The Ozone Project has secured The Stylist Group as its latest publisher – marking the first time the digital ad platform has signed a partner from the magazine market.
The publisher of female lifestyle magazine Stylist is now the fifth business to pool its digital ad inventory into the collaborative platform since Ozone launched last year.
The deal, announced on Thursday, will also see The Stylist Group represent the digital newspaper titles of its parent company DC Thomson, which includes 17 other online publications.
The Ozone Project – which counts The Guardian, News UK, The Telegraph and Reach among its founding members – pools online ad inventory to make it easier for advertisers to buy premium publisher audiences with a single buying point.
The platform reaches 44 million adults in the UK each month, and 99% of the UK’s online population, meaning it rivals Facebook for scale in the UK.
The addition of The Stylist Group will ad an extra half million adults every week and the partnership will deliver “incremental audience intelligence” to enable greater contextual ad targeting.
“The Stylist Group and DC Thomson are hugely excited to join The Ozone Project,” said David Hayter, head of digital, The Stylist Group.
“As a publisher we have been through a digital transformation over the past 12 months and during that time I’ve been closely watching what The Ozone Project has been creating. The Stylist Group has always been an advocate for transparency in the digital advertising eco-system and have found The Ozone Project to closely mirror the values that Stylist has always strived to work towards.”
In its first year, The Ozone Project claims to have worked with more than 70 brands and has delivered quarter-on-quarter revenue growth upwards of 200%.
“The great content created by The Stylist Group is hugely complementary to the quality, trusted editorial generated by our founders’ titles on a daily basis,” said Damon Reeve, CEO, The Ozone Project.
“This partnership certainly sets the bar for the quality of content publisher that The Ozone Project will partner with in the future.”
Reeve told Mediatel News last year that there had always been a plan to broaden Ozone’s invite to other publishers.
“Publishers are going to almost certainly be aligned to the principles of why we’re doing Ozone in the first place,” he said.
“The more publishers who use the same framework – and I deliberately call it a framework rather than technology, as it’s a way of working – the greater the voice publishers can have in this ecosystem. We want publishers to be a primary decision maker in a market where they are on the periphery…and if the Ozone Project is of interest to other publishers, we want to be able to support them.”
Mediatel News understands that Ozone Project is currently in talks with other magazine publishers, but no names have been confirmed. However, a spokesperson for Hearst said the publisher currently had no plans to join.
