With two finalist nominations in this year’s awards season, Bryan Scott, our marketing lead, shares the story of Ozone Marketplace…
As one of our major product releases in 2020, Ozone Marketplace presents advertisers and agencies with a direct connection to Ozone’s premium inventory. This is an abridged version of our entry for 2020’s innovation awards…
2020 was the year that changed the course of programmatic advertising forever:
ISBA and PwC’s investigation into the programmatic supply chain highlighted major transparency and accountability issues; be it advertiser campaigns appearing on an average of 40,000+ websites, only 51% of adspend reaching publishers, the 15% ‘unknown delta’ of unaccountable spend, or the fact that only 12% of impressions could be matched.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how primitive brand safety tools were driving advertising spend away from text-heavy quality editorial environments onto unregulated websites in the long tail of the internet.
The ICO’s report into RTB and Adtech called foul the misuse of data in programmatic and demanded change, prompting Google to announce the disabling of third-party cookies on Chrome; a move that will reduce the amount of data passed between programmatic platforms.
This final point creates huge implications for the majority of programmatic spend coming through Open Market Programmatic (OMP), which in itself represents an industry wide challenge as programmatic spend accounts for c.90% of all digital display budgets. The removal of personal or targeting data dramatically reduces the value of OMP as a marketing channel to both advertisers and publishers.
The Ozone Project was created by the UK’s leading publishers to provide advertisers with access to platform-scale audiences in the most engaging, premium, editorially-governed environments. As a result, we were perfectly positioned to create a better alternative to OMP.
OBJECTIVES
Create a better, safer, premium alternative to OMP
The objectives for this project were simple in their expression, yet complex to deliver. We wanted to create a mutually beneficial marketplace, placing advertiser and publisher interests at its core. At the heart of our innovation was the desire to:
Create a better, safer, premium alternative to OMP; embodying all the positives of the open market, while solving for the many challenges it faced.
Maximise marketplace effectiveness and efficiencies for advertisers and agencies, while addressing key client issues such as transparency, compliance and addressability.
Create more integrated relationships between premium publishers and advertisers through Ozone, while maximising marketplace revenue for our publisher partners
THE STRATEGIC SOLUTION
Introducing Ozone Marketplace
Ozone Marketplace was built to provide advertisers and agencies with a single, brand-safe connection to a broadcast-scale marketplace of premium publisher content. As a result, Ozone Marketplace directly addresses the many challenges facing OMP:
Singular Simplicity: Ozone Marketplace offers a single direct connection to multiple publishers for reaching audiences at platform-scale.
Premium Scale: As the UK’s biggest publisher alliance, Ozone Marketplace provides access to our combined monthly reach of 45.3m (99.6%) online adults - vs. Google 45.3m, Facebook 43.5m, Amazon 42.8m.
Brand safe by default: Combining editorially-governed environments with our proprietary brand safety technology ensures brands only appear in safe environments; while reducing block rates by 75% (vs. third party vendors) without impacting independently verified brand safety scores.
100% Transparency: All spend through Ozone Marketplace reaches our premium publishers, maximising working media for brands while lowering tech and transaction costs.
Unique Insight: The depth of Ozone’s cross-origin, first-party data provides exclusive behaviour-driven, actionable insights for advertiser and agency campaign planning.
Maximising Opportunity: Combining first-party data with Ozone’s ID capability increases addressable audience for advertisers by +51% versus OMP.
Fully Compliant: In line with GDPR, Ozone Marketplace has a ‘privacy by design’ approach, ensuring data can be used correctly and ethically.
RESULTS
Great results & a new publisher revenue stream
As our customers seek alternatives to OMP, Ozone Marketplace delivers impressive efficiencies and results via a single connection. Its creation allows for tailored enterprise-level integration and has already generated significant engagement and investment from the majority of the major agency groups like GroupM, Omnicom and Dentsu, and directly from brands - including Vodafone and P&G - who have in-housed elements of their digital marketing activity,
Launching in summer 2020, Ozone Marketplace represented 8% of Ozone’s total 2020 revenue and is set for 6x growth this year. This growth is particularly impressive when considering Ozone’s total revenues increased 4x in 2020, with further 4x growth forecast for 2021.
Sources: Comscore, December 2020, Ozone internal figures
