Ozone – the UK’s premium digital advertising platform built for brands, by publishers – has done the double at The Media Leaders Awards 2023 by winning Tech Company of the Year and Tech CEO of the Year, for Damon Reeve, our CEO. We were also nominated for the Leadership Team of the Year prize – won by Zenith UK – to narrowly miss out on a hat-trick of honours.

We’re delighted to have been nominated in and won the Technology Company Year prize for the second consecutive year. Our business is as much about connecting brands to a nationwide audience of highly engaged readers as it is a leader in creating technology solutions that benefit premium publisher and advertisers. Some of those innovations include our publisher Biddable Management Service, Ozone Smart Bidstream and advertiser tool, Ozone Ad Manager. Other nominees in the hotly contested category included Peach, PubMatic and PwC UK.

Speaking about this award, our CEO Damon Reeve said, “It may come as a surprise to many that around 50% of our team is made up of product managers, engineers and data scientists, who are critical in allowing the rest of our team to deliver what we do for advertisers, agencies and publishers. This award truly celebrates the massive contribution they make in shaping our ambition to power the premium web.”

Our successes as a technology business and commercially are of course driven by brilliant leadership, so it’s even more delightful for us that our CEO Damon picked up the Tech CEO of the Year prize. As Ozoner number one, Damon has driven Ozone from a start-up, forging an historic collaboration between four of the UK’s biggest premium publishers, into a multi-award winning scale up business celebrating our fifth anniversary this year. Congratulations Damon for the whole Ozone team.

Thanks to the Media Leader and Adwanted Events for our three nominations. Thanks also to the judges for recognising our achievements as a technology business driven by an exceptional leader. Finally, many congratulations to all the other winners and nominees at this year’s awards.