Ozone – the digital ad platform founded by four of the UK’s largest publishers – recently unveiled a major shift in its strategic narrative. With its new brand messaging, ‘The Art of Connection’, Ozone is positioning itself as a platform alternative to social and programmatic tech channels, marrying scaled reach with the context of trusted content environments. Ozone’s new call to action, meanwhile, ‘The Connection Advantage’, refers to the multiplier effect created by bringing together quality audiences, premium content, and smart technology.
NDA spoke with Damon Reeve, CEO at Ozone to find out more…
What’s new at Ozone?
There are organisational changes, some promotions within the team, which are in response to our recent growth and to support our future growth plans at home and internationally. We’re starting to do a lot more with more people in different places. The internal promotions are about rewarding excellence and recognising people that have been doing a great job in helping Ozone to move forward.
We’re also evolving our storytelling as, in the past, because we are owned by publishers, we have been a little publisher-centric in our positioning, with our narrative focusing on the premium web. For sure, we’re proud to be anchored in the publishing world, but there are other aspects of our proposition that were being overlooked. For example, there wasn’t a lot of focus on the way that publishers, firstly, curate an engaged audience but also the way in which professional publishers help advertisers reach and connect with those audiences. In addition, there’s also a lot to be said about the evolution of our technology – the platform itself – and how popular it is with users. We’re also keen to talk more about our creative credentials – our in-house studio capabilities – which is becoming an increasingly significant part of our proposition.
Your new brand narrative refers to ‘The Art of Connection’ and ‘The Connection Advantage’ – can you explain what you mean in each case?
‘The Art of Connection’ speaks to the art of publishing, and the way in which publishers are steeped in experience when it comes to producing content that engages, informs, entertains and inspires their target audiences. Quality content creates and curates genuine human connections. We want to celebrate that as an artform and recognise that those connections can provide advertisers with a genuine commercial advantage.
Everyone is looking for better, authentic human connections. We believe that our curated audiences, combined with Ozone’s technology and creative capabilities, offer brand advertisers a real advantage over other media buying platforms. What’s more, we’re now able to prove that through measurement and effectiveness studies.
Ozone is growing beyond the UK – what international territories are using the Ozone platform?
Well, I’m talking to you from New York, so the US is a big growth market that we’ve been working in, primarily with publishers, for the last three years. We are now also starting to work much more directly with brands and agencies in the US.
Since the start of this year, we’ve also been doing a lot more in Europe, particularly working with international agencies that are planning from the UK or the US for markets across Europe. That’s a significant growth area, particularly for the UK business. For the rest of this year, I think Europe will be our primary focus but, ideally, I’d like to end up at a place where Ozone is everywhere.
What are Ozone’s business priorities over the next 12 months?
There’s an ‘operationalisation’ component that comes with expansion into other markets. Getting the business infrastructure established from a product point of view in the markets that we’ve discussed obviously takes time and focus.
We’ll also spend time building, supporting and strengthening the new narrative around human connection, measurement and proving our value in the marketing mix. The role that we play is really important. So, there’s a big investment around measurement and proving value.
Beyond that, our focus is always on deepening the relationships we have with buyers, which comes in the form of better integrations with the planning and insights tools that they use around media spending. Our objective is always to make it easier for brands and agencies to buy into the premium publishing environments that we support.
