Ozone moves into performance marketing with launch of Arc
Ozone has launched Arc, a product that lets advertisers optimise for performance outcomes across the digital publishing ad platform’s pooled publisher inventory.
Arc uses Ozone’s audience data to predict where audiences are in a purchase journey within a specific brand category. It then uses algorithms to predict who is most likely to deliver a specified outcome for a given brand, and when they are most likely to do so. Campaign delivery is then automatically optimised toward those opportunities.
The offering comes as Ozone has increasingly sought to position itself as a legitimate alternative to global social media platforms by offering similar audience scale (Ozone now claims to reach “almost 300m consumers” across its inventory), an in-house creative studio, and, now, performance marketing capabilities.
During an interview with The Media Leader last summer, Ozone CEO Damon Reeve said the company was looking to close the gap between the “hundreds” of advertisers it then counted and the millions of advertisers that frequent platforms like Meta.
“I appreciate that there are going to be a whole set of [small- and medium-sized enterprises] that aren’t relevant to what we do, but there is a big set of mid-tier and bigger brands that we do work really well with, that are not currently investing,” he said. “That is really our opportunity, to prove to that set that we do create value, that we are a comparable channel [to Big Tech platforms].”
By offering performance marketing capabilities, the bet is that Ozone will better prove its value to such advertisers, many of which focus primarily on driving shorter-term business metrics.
Ozone was founded in 2018 as a joint venture between some of the UK’s largest publishers — News UK, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group and Reach — but has since expanded globally to include dozens of other publishers. The company formally launched operations in the US last October.
Arc is the latest in a line of innovations developed by Ozone this year, including a content classification solution, Ozone Access, and an AI research and development centre, Ozone Labs.
“Where scale has underpinned the growth of social and search platforms, Ozone now offers advertisers a credible alternative that can deliver full transparency and accountability without sacrificing the quality of the environments in which their campaigns appear,” added Craig Tuck, Ozone’s global chief revenue officer.
He explained Arc “allows us to apply those strengths to the performance-led outcomes an advertiser wants to achieve”.
The product has already been tested by the Alzheimer’s Society, in partnership with independent agency Medialab. Ozone claims the campaign resulted in 59% more donations per user reached.
Jonathan Strong, the Alzheimer’s Society’s senior digital marketing manager, called Ozone “a proven digital partner”, noting Arc provided “deeper intelligence and real-time optimisations to drive outcome-based KPIs, including efficient donor conversations.”
While Ozone looks to expand into performance marketing, its leaders remain keen to highlight the impact advertising in premium, trusted environments has on brand effects.
A survey, commissioned by Ozone and conducted by OnePoll, found that news, magazine and lifestyle websites are the only digital advertising environment where trust outweighs distrust, with a net score of +12 for publishing brands compared to -18 for ads in social feeds and stories.
The poll also found that four in 10 UK adults have either bought something or “taken a step toward buying” after seeing an ad on editorial site.
The trust effect, Ozone claims, “runs one way”, with seven times as many respondents saying an ad for a brand they know on a premium website would increase trust in that brand as would reduce it.
Ozone senior growth director Tom Harrison will discuss the launch of Arc in more detail with The Media Leader at this week’s Future of Media Manchester conference.