Ozone launches AI research and development centre
Digital publishing ad platform Ozone has launched a collaborative research and development centre to understand how AI technologies may impact the future of product and commercial models in publishing and marketing.
Ozone Labs will operate as a “sandbox” alongside Ozone’s core business, serving as a space for partners to experiment, build product prototypes, and test new business models.
The initiative will support research through benchmarking efforts and white papers that explore how publishers’ content is sourced, valued, and used within large language models (LLMs).
It comes as AI search — which provides users information on queries scraped from publisher sites without the need to click through to a link — threatens the viability of publisher business models that are overly reliant on referral traffic, and could undermine subscription-based publishers by giving consumers access to content that is otherwise paywalled.
Ozone Labs will also host “Labs Live” hackathons, run in partnership with brands, agencies and publishers. At the events, collaborative teams will sprint to build working prototypes around shared challenges. Pilot events are currently being planned in both the UK and US.
Professional prototypes in active development will be made open source separately to enable industry collaboration in testing and evaluating AI-driven adtech developed with the Labs.
Labs will be led by Scott Switzer, Ozone’s chief technology officer.
In its 2025 results, Ozone claimed it now reaches 228m global monthly users through its member publishers, including recent US additions such as CNN and The Washington Post. In the UK, publishing brands within Ozone reach 42% of Brits daily.
Moving everyone forward
Ozone CEO Damon Reeve told The Media Leader the company had been “kicking around” the idea of Labs for some time as a way to engage with collaborators about “under the hood” developments, even if they don’t eventually make it to market.
“We do a lot of interesting stuff. Some of it doesn’t make it to market, but some of it is really interesting that others may be able to learn from and share,” he said. “A lot of the new technologies are inspiring people to be a lot more collaborative. What we’re finding is, in that mode of show and tell, it’s good for other people to see.”
The “Labs Live” hackathons likewise came about as a way to expand on internal projects. Ozone has for years hosted quarterly hackathons with its engineering teams, most of which are based in Poland, and during a recent remote hackathon, business stakeholders in London saw it as an opportunity. One media agency, which Reeve declined to disclose, was visiting Ozone’s office at the time and expressed interest in taking part.
Meanwhile, Ozone has sought to understand how to better help publishing partners navigate concerns around how AI models source their content. Reeve described that even publishers with existing licensing agreements with AI companies suffer from “a huge amount of asymmetry [between] what the AI company knows and what the publisher knows.”
By creating an “experimentation platform” that simulates multiple LLMs, the team hopes to test how information is sourced and to let individual publishers run benchmark tests against different models, including Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. More generalised white papers will then be released off the back of this work.
“We’ll be fairly agnostic in the interest of research,” Reeve said. “We’ll work with and benchmark all of them.” He nevertheless described Ozone’s own engineers as currently “Claude Code evangelists”, but acknowledged that may change as AI models develop, adding that, “as a business, we have to be aware of what the differences are between the models.”
According to Reeve, a key success metric for the initiative will be “the accelerated delivery of future capabilities back into Ozone’s core advertising platform business.” This could include developments in agentic selling of ad inventory and products in the service of content licensing.
“We’re in a phase right now where there’s a huge amount of innovation and creativity. People are trying stuff, people are doing new things,” he said. In that environment, an open-source approach benefits the entire industry.
“Standards and protocols are really important,” he concluded. “Being able to build on the work that someone has done previously and try to push that forward moves everyone forward.
“If everyone sat in the background and just did their own thing, then everyone’s in first gear, working on the same stuff at the same time.”