Ozone, the digital advertising business owned by News UK, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group and Reach Plc, has struck a new partnership with Content Ignite, the ad tech platform built specifically for independent and specialist publishers. The deal will see Ozone’s premium demand made available through Content Ignite’s Fusion platform, giving smaller UK publishers access to capabilities that have historically been reserved for the industry’s largest players.
Danny Spears, Chief Operating Officer at Ozone, explained that managing a small publisher’s account costs the same as managing a large one, which has long shaped where ad tech providers choose to focus. “When you think about how ad tech prioritises, it looks at the biggest opportunities and tries to hoover up volume. That means it goes after the big targets in the first instance,” he said. In practice, while smaller, niche publishers haven’t been ignored, their ad servers are often managed offshore with no named representative to call on.
Ozone, he said, has “long had a keen interest from the very outset in supporting publishers of all sizes and guises.” Content Ignite, which serves billions of ad impressions a month across more than 400 websites including The Observer, Global, Haymarket and The Weather Channel, provides the route that allows them to do this. “We’ve found a partner in Content Ignite who we know has built specialism around servicing small publishers, and is very well regarded in that space,” Spears said.
Spears said the partnership gives Content Ignite’s publishers access to Ozone’s demand and monetisation of audiences, helping them extend monetisation beyond default open marketplace activity, as well as new features and capabilities through Ozone’s server-side infrastructure — again, something not typically within reach of the specialist end of the market until now.
The move also taps into a broader shift in how brands are buying media. Spears argued that Ozone has always focused on removing friction from the transaction for advertisers. For publishers weighing up the value of the tie-up, Spears was candid that uplift will vary by publisher. “It can become significant depending on the profile of the publisher, the types of formats that they run, the maturity of their own stack and their monetisation strategy, whether they have a paywall, for example,” he said.
The partnership is as philosophical as it is practical, as Spears points to a shared outlook between the two businesses rather than just a technical fit. “I really like this partnership because of the nature of our two businesses — I think we’re well aligned around important considerations such as support for different types of publishers and the value that they deliver,” he said.
He was quick to credit Content Ignite’s own expertise: “What’s very clear from an Ozone perspective is Content Ignite have incredible specialism in areas that we don’t.” That complementary fit, he said, “in terms of technologies and also the customer segments that we’ve historically served.”
James Hanslip, CEO of Content Ignite, echoed the sentiment in the companies’ joint announcement, noting that the business was founded in 2014 to give specialist and independent publishers access to the same technology, intelligence and demand relied upon by the biggest media owners, and that the Ozone tie-up marked “another significant step towards that vision.”
