Publishers should ‘take rightful control’ in programmatic

Partner content

Danny Spears, chief operating officer of The Ozone Project, takes us ‘under the hood’ of Ozone’s premium publisher infrastructure following the alliance’s ‘Technology Company of the Year’ win at the 2022 Media Leaders Awards.

As publisher programmatic approaches its next defining moment, Danny Spears, Ozone’s chief operating officer, is reflecting on another quarter of growth for the premium publisher alliance; a quarter that included winning best technology company gong at The Media Leaders Awards.

Spears is quick to deflect praise to Ozone’s “passionate and non-stop” team. “This really was an award for the efforts across the business,” he says. “Our technology sits at Ozone’s heart, especially for the teams that build, integrate and sell it”.

For Spears, his day-to-day centres on working with Ozone’s growing family of premium publishers, both at home and internationally. He highlights three areas of focus, sitting under the banner of Ozone Publisher Services, for what he describes as “the flexible ways our publisher partners can work with us”.

He briefly points to the first –  Ozone’s Managed Demand –  as what many know Ozone for; audience led-solutions, across 250+ UK publisher domains, sold by Ozone’s sales team. Spears points to great success here with “2021 seeing 75% growth in media investment, with an advertiser count to match”, delivered through managed service, programmatic deals and direct connections with buyers and brands.

Technology and talent: a winning combination

Beyond this, Spears is keen to discuss the second of Ozone’s publisher offerings, in the shape of the proprietary technologies –  “Pubtech” as he refers to it – developed to help publishers maximise the value of their inventory and first-party data. He nods to a “huge amount of resource” that’s been invested to build these tools.

“We’ve created unique tech, specifically designed for the premium publisher”, he says. “Take for example our publisher-centric Ozone ID, a solution incorporating numerous unique, first-party publisher data signals that increase audience addressability –  and revenue potential –  from the 50% UK benchmark, to north of 85%. Similarly, our proprietary ‘smart bidstream’ technology allows publishers to take greater control over what data they make available to ad partners –  reducing unwanted leakage –  while also creating monetisation uplift from our AI-driven yield optimisations”.

On top of this growing range of technology, Spears talks about significant investment in talent; “We’re continually building our operations, technical and analytics expertise, having more than doubled team size in the past eighteen months”.

This people power combined with Ozone’s pubtech and data infrastructure fuels the third publisher offering, Ozone Biddable Management. “Think of it as our high touch solution”, Spears explains. “Working with such a broad range of partners, flexibility is key. With publishers at different digital life stages, with different audience and revenue growth strategies, we have to adapt to meet their needs”.

So what role does Biddable Management play in this? “We’ve seen greatest uptake from small to mid-sized publishers needing cost-effective, low resource revenue management, as well as from larger –  usually international –  publishers wanting to scale monetisation outside of their domestic markets”.

Building controls for international success

Spears talks passionately about restoring favour to the publisher on the supply-side of the digital ecosystem, and specifically “creating a layer of control that allows publishers, not ad tech companies, to determine their ‘last mile’ in the supply chain”. It’s clear to see where Ozone’s commitment to resolving this comes from. “There’s a shocking disparity and disconnect in digital audience growth delivered by premium publishers and the reward, in terms of ad revenue, making its way back to them” Spears says, pointing to excessive value being extracted by intermediary businesses.

And this control is especially needed for the publishers’ coveted first-party data. While Ozone has an explicit contractual relationship with each publisher to reward individual contribution of data, Spears highlights others who are acting to the detriment of the publisher. “Whether it’s bots scraping pages, or ad partners building adjacent contextual businesses through the non-legitimate use of publisher data, our aim is to help our partners ensure there is a fair value-exchange when they choose to monetise their data through an intermediary”.

This publisher-centric approach is certainly in demand. In the UK, Spears cites a widening stable of premium publisher partners, often rich in vertical depth, to complement the “audience scale sought by advertisers” already within the alliance. Globally, Ozone is working in tandem with other premium publisher collaborations in the US and several other major markets to provide a framework for success and the technology solutions to reduce their time to market.

“We’re really proud of the inroads we’ve made”, says Spears, “and we’re increasingly aware of Ozone’s role in helping any premium publisher, big or small, no matter where they are in the world, to create a more sustainable future for their digital business”.