Ozone eyes US expansion as it takes on Big Tech
The Media Leader Interview
CEO Damon Reeve on why the company believes it can compete with tech platforms for ad revenue and how the UK startup is expanding its footprint internationally.
Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest… Ozone?
There’s no reason why the UK-based publisher-backed digital ad sales house shouldn’t be considered akin to the Big Tech platforms, says CEO Damon Reeve.
“Our reach is in the ballpark of other platforms, which is why this should be our consideration set,” he tells The Media Leader in conversation at Ozone’s London Bridge office.
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 to include dozens of other publishers.
The goal: package their respective audiences together to make them an easier sell to advertisers wanting to target readers of what Ozone’s leadership has referred to as “the premium web”.
The concern is media agencies all think of Ozone in slightly different terms, Reeve admits. Is it a publisher network? A supply-side platform? A halfway house? A creative studio?
“What we tried to do was talk about the better part of the internet, the places where people spend their time to be informed, entertained, engaged. That’s what Ozone tried to do with the premium web — or does do with the premium web,” says Reeve.
“It’s just hard because the feedback from advertisers is: ‘Well, prove it. Measure results, measure the outcomes, prove that you are actually valuable and you’re not just saying it.'”
Ozone is thus investing a great deal in technology and measurement efforts. And with a new positioning for its product suite, the team has been conducting more than two-dozen roadshows at agencies, many of which weren’t previously aware of all aspects of Ozone’s business.
“We started working on a different way of thinking about what we do, which is — instead of collecting a whole group of publishers who are producing professional content — thinking about it through the lens of their audience,” he continues. “What [Ozone’s publishers] do is curate an amazingly engaged, attentive audience, collectively, that advertisers want to engage in.”
Reeve argues that is not unlike any tech platform. “We think of ourselves as this,” he states. “And this is where we believe publishing as a channel should live.”
US expansion imminent
Taking on the tech platforms requires global and omnichannel expansion, and Reeve and his team are in the midst of a substantial growth project. The company is currently in the contracting and onboarding stages of adding nearly 20 US publishers to its alliance — a move that would substantially increase Ozone’s footprint on the other side of the Atlantic.
The agreements have been “backlogged” by a lack of “maturity” in the US over data regulation relative to Europe, but “patience plays out”, says Reeve.
Other target markets include Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada and Asia-Pacific, with the goal of “expanding the depth and profile of the publishers we’re working with”, he adds.
With agencies increasingly consolidating into regional hubs that spend across multiple markets, Ozone must match that effort. Reeve explains: “That’s one of the characteristics the big platforms provide. It’s a must-have.”
As part of Ozone’s international expansion efforts, the company is growing headcount by one-fifth this year with the addition of 24 employees.
Ozone plans hiring spree as it highlights ‘connection advantage’
While he declines to name which publishers are in active contractual discussions, The Media Leader is aware that The New York Times had attended a meeting with Ozone in Cannes last month.
Reeve confirmed that Ozone has spoken with the title and hinted that other US publishers on the list include those with substantial multimedia inventory, such as broadcasters and connected TV (CTV) players that also operate websites with good traffic. These could include CNN, MSNBC or CNBC, for example.
Ozone’s move into video began at the start of this year, when it started monetising its publishers’ content on YouTube. It will soon be expanding into CTV to meet the demands of future US publishing partners.
In addition, Ozone is actively looking at how to better monetise Apple News, which Reeve notes “drives a huge amount of traffic” to its publishers, but that it is “incredibly hard to monetise well” at the present.
While a title like The New York Times would be a big feather in Ozone’s cap, Reeve insists that, for advertisers, it’s less about the prestige of any given publisher than the combined audience brands can reach through the group collectively.
Ozone already claims to reach over 200m Americans via its current partners — not inclusive of the US publishers it’s currently onboarding.
“We’ve got a good spread,” Reeve says. “You’re capturing the right audience and that’s what we’re going for: the audience that’s right for their brand, not the publisher.”
Outcomes measurement and Origin integration
Of course, the right audience is worthless if it isn’t measured effectively.
“The web doesn’t know how to prove its value in the same way other media channels do,” Reeve argues. “Unless you’re a [direct response] advertiser, you don’t really value the advertising experience in the web. It’s just low value. It’s hard to elevate it from that.”
For Ozone, the name of the game is changing that perception for its partners, both at the top and bottom of the funnel. This requires an expansion of data infrastructure.
“As we move towards not just focusing on brand campaign strategies but full funnel, then you just need a whole different type of data,” Reeve explains.
The goal is to soon be able to measure and predict outcomes for campaigns bought via Ozone, similar to efforts by UK broadcasters to develop Lantern, a measurement panel aimed at tracking the short-term impact of ads on sales.
In the meantime, Ozone is also in active discussions to integrate into Origin, the Isba-led cross-media measurement initiative that launched to the full UK market this month.
“We’re in the process of actively mapping out a POC [proof of concept] with Origin,” Reeve reveals to The Media Leader. The aim is to deliver a POC to advertisers some time in H2.
“It’s slow, but at least it’s happening,” he says of publishers’ incorporation into Origin, which currently only includes linear TV, online video and online display. “It’s not just talk. It’s the platforms that have been agitating to get us into the product. They don’t want it to be just the platform show.”
Will brands reinvest in news?
Ozone’s efforts to make publishing look and act more like tech platforms come at an inflection point for an industry that in recent years has been put on the defensive amid shrinking ad investment and extreme losses in referral traffic from search and social media.
This has been exacerbated by developments in generative-AI search, which have reduced click-through rates and put publishers that rely on ad revenue at risk of decline.
“The rubber’s hitting the road now,” says Reeve. “Most publishers have diversified their revenue, so I’d say, to some extent, they’re insulated. Their digital ad revenues are being impacted but they’ve moved to events, subscriptions… Some have done better than others.
“Those that don’t have distinct content and have, in the past, really chased scale and volume and don’t have other strategies — their revenue is going to be impacted for sure.”
While the prospect of “Google Zero” — the possibility that referral traffic from search dries up entirely — has become a “fairly accepted concept” among publishing leaders, more alarming to Reeve is brands’ lack of interest in supporting news over disproven concerns around brand safety.
Responding to a recent report by The Media Leader in which brand marketers from Luxottica and Reckitt admitted that they were still choosing to avoid advertising against news, Reeve calls it “obviously concerning”.
“Our job is to educate on the importance of not discriminating on environment, that you’re reaching the right audience, that actually the whole point of the Stagwell research was to point out it absolutely makes no difference to brand perception,” says Reeve. “So it’s disappointing that those views are out there.”
In conversations with advertisers, he notes that Ozone is still forced to “highlight the importance of lifestyle content as much as news content”, with brand marketers often reluctant to “advertise against hard news”.
Nailing the pitch with media buyers and growing engagement and awareness of what Ozone does and the wide reach of its audience — especially now that it is moving into new markets — will be the company’s biggest area of focus moving forward.
“All of it comes down to: can you demonstrate and prove value in a full-funnel capacity,” Reeve concludes. “If you can, then you’re in the game.”