Digital advertising business Ozone has announced the launch of Aura, its proprietary audience access and content classification solution.
Built in-house by Ozone’s product team, Aura is designed to help advertisers connect with more of their audiences across Ozone’s platform, which reaches more than 250 million consumers across the US and UK in trusted, high-attention online environments.
New Digital Age spoke with Craig Tuck, Chief Revenue Officer at Ozone, to find out more…
What was the original motivation behind developing the Aura tool? What problem were you trying to solve?
I wouldn’t say it was one specific moment in time. We’re addressing a challenge that’s been well documented for as long as we can remember in digital media.
There’s industry data suggesting around 70% of digital inventory is currently unaddressable. Obviously that has an impact on publishers and news outlets trying to monetise content, but the really important thing, and often the forgotten thing, is the impact on advertisers.
What we’re really talking about is the loss of signal and the loss of opportunity to reach audiences. Advertisers are being prevented from reaching heavily engaged audiences that could help grow their brands.
There was a Marketing Science Institute quote that really stuck with me: brands grow by reaching more new customers, not by selling more to existing customers. So that incremental audience reach – and the inability to access it – has been a challenge for quite some time.
How does Aura improve on traditional brand safety or content classification tools?
Hugely, really. One of the key advantages we have is that Ozone is directly integrated with some of the biggest publishers globally. That gives us a privileged position strategically, but also technically, because we understand the content better than anybody else.
The speed at which we can classify content is a major differentiator. Traditionally, content classification has often been done in quite a crude way, usually looking at URLs or URL slugs. We go much deeper than that and understand the content on the page itself.
As a result, across every category, we’re seeing an average increase of around 35% in audience reach using Aura versus a typical third-party brand safety verification partner. We’re also seeing around a 36% uplift in page views across the platform.
By understanding content properly—and classifying it quickly—we’re unlocking a huge amount of incremental audience for brands.
Travel is a great example. The average uplift is 35%, but in travel it can be as much as three times that. News is another big one. It’s obviously a more sensitive category, and some brands automatically avoid it altogether, but we’re able to help advertisers safely access those audiences and grow their business.
So this is about more than just brand safety?
Absolutely. Ozone is brand-safe by default. This is premium internet inventory – editorially governed, professionally produced content.
What Aura is really about is suitability and audience incrementality.
It works alongside our Premium Audience ID proposition, which allows us to address audiences in privacy-browser environments where third-party cookies aren’t available and advertisers are often flying blind.
So it’s a combination of understanding audiences through first-party data and then using Aura to classify content intelligently around those audiences. Those two things working together are what really make the proposition powerful.
What has the market reaction been so far?
Really positive. But this is not an area to be taken lightly. Brand safety is incredibly important, so understandably brands want to move carefully.
We’ve been testing Aura extensively, and the results consistently show increased audience reach without increasing brand risk. That’s the key point.
But naturally, advertisers are on a journey. They want proof that they can safely transition from existing approaches to something new. So it’s about building confidence over time.
Ultimately, some may move fully across to Aura, but these are serious investment decisions, so people are taking baby steps towards that transition.
More broadly, what other issues are rising up the agenda for advertisers and media buyers right now?
We probably haven’t got long enough to cover them all. But for me, the biggest one is AI – specifically, making sure we don’t lose the transparency and accountability that the industry has spent the last decade trying to build.
There’s been a huge amount of work done across digital advertising around effectiveness, efficiency, transparency and compliance. My concern would be that, through careless use of AI, we accidentally reintroduce opacity into the ecosystem.
Now, AI used responsibly is phenomenal. We use it throughout our own business where it adds value. But it’s important that there’s still transparency around how it’s being used: what’s powering products, where the data is coming from, what the connectors are.
Things like quality, compliance, permission, value creation rather than value extraction. Those principles still need to exist in an AI-powered world. That’s probably the biggest thing the industry needs to keep a close eye on.
