Speaking with Tyrone Stewart, our new Director, Commercial Trading outlines her aims in the new role.
The Ozone Project’s Jacque Chadwick chats with Tyrone Stewart about her recent step into the newly-formed role of Director, Commercial Trading a year after joining the business.
Monday 24th May 2021 - first published on New Digital Age
Firstly, what’s it like to be given the new role as Director, Commercial Trading?
Over the past year, I’ve had a brilliant time working at The Ozone Project as acting Agency Sales Director, covering Natalie Dawson’s maternity leave. When the opportunity arose to stay within the business in this newly created role, I jumped at the chance. Behind the headlines of innovation, growth and delivering customer impact, is a great team of people who genuinely care about doing digital advertising better – and that’s a team I was incredibly keen to remain part of.
As our platform continues to evolve, stepping into this newly-created, customer-facing role presents an exciting opportunity to channel the energy and passion I have for what we do.
What does the role encompass?
In this new role, I will take responsibility for managing Ozone’s trading relationships with our agency customers. Like most media owners, our agency partners represent many of our biggest customers and at the heart of my new role will be ensuring that what Ozone offers aligns with their needs.
How does this improve the Ozone model?
Since launch, Ozone has been very consultative and collaborative in our sales approach and my role will add another dimension to our market-facing discussions. Reporting into our CRO Craig [Tuck], I will be working closely with Natalie, Sophie [Raptis] and Emma [Cranston] – who respectively head up our agency sales, client sales and client services’ teams – to ensure Ozone is well represented and that our customers really understand the value that can be derived from our premium inventory, insights and audience engagement that lie at the heart of our platform.
What does this mean for Ozone’s agency relationships? How will you ensure they’re getting maximum value?
My ambitions for the new commercial trading role specifically are to build on the success of the launch phase of The Ozone Project and develop the best commercial foundations for agencies and clients. Since landing at Ozone, it has become a personal passion project to act as ambassador across the agency world to inspire and educate about our values and unrivalled proposition. Building out this new role is the next stage in the commercial evolution which I aim to use as a platform to deepen our agency & client relationships; identifying new and exciting opportunities and become an even more integral partner.
Looking ahead to the future, it is hugely exciting to be part of the Ozone journey and am looking forward to playing a key role in Ozone’s growth.
Looking more generally, how do you feel about the state of the digital ad space at the moment? Where do you feel it is heading?
Real change in digital advertising has been looming on the horizon for some time now, and it finally feels like that change is happening – and that’s before you even take into account the effect of the pandemic. Whether it’s the impact of browser changes, regulations, studies like ISBA and PwC’s report into programmatic supply chain transparency, there’s a growing realisation that things won’t – and shouldn’t – go back to how they were.
From our discussions with customers, there’s a lot of work needed to unravel some of the legacy challenges that remain intertwined with digital advertising today. However, at the same time, it genuinely feels like both brands and agencies want the ecosystem to evolve in a way that best meets their needs and works to deliver the results they need.
What can we expect to see from Ozone in particular?
In many ways, Ozone’s creation pre-empted many of today’s digital advertising challenges. We are a platform built for brands by publishers, that puts the primary consumer stakeholders in the advertising relationship front and centre. We were built with a third-party cookie-free future in mind, recognising the huge value of first-party publisher consumption data. We launched post the introduction of GDPR with a ‘privacy by design’ approach that places great importance on what we do with customer data.
Our aim is to create a better future for digital advertising and as such we will continue to be unashamedly advertiser-led with a highly collaborative, test-and-learn approach that is focused on delivering the very best outcomes for our customers’ campaigns.
