In the latest update with our team members, we talk to Karen Ritchie about her role heading up account management for our publisher stakeholders and its importance for the strength of our alliance.
Since joining Ozone towards the end of 2019, Karen Ritchie, Ozone’s head of publisher account management, has played a pivotal role in ensuring our publishers are able to meet the campaign needs of our advertisers.
Karen, talk us through a typical day in your life at Ozone…
It might be a bit of a cliche, but very few days are ever the same. Yet one thing that is fairly consistent is that I’ll usually spend a lot of time analysing our publisher dashboards and understanding the impact of our advertisers’ campaigns on each publisher’s inventory and data. With a relationship-based job, I’ll naturally spend a lot of time on the phone or video calls with our key publisher contacts talking about new campaigns or new product deployment. As a business, we’re all about bringing the advertiser and publisher closer together to create better campaigns, and my role is to act as the link between both sides within Ozone.
Ozone is positioned as a platform for delivering highly attentive audiences through premium publishers. How does this impact the types of publishers you work with?
Many think Ozone’s publishing base could expand infinitely, but if you were to ask yourself how many good quality websites you can name would your answer be in the tens, hundreds or thousands? Earlier this year the ISBA/PwC report into transparency in programmatic advertising highlighted that the average advertiser campaign ran across over 40,000 different websites. Forty Thousand! I’m not sure I could name 400 and they wouldn’t all be the best quality.
What Ozone offers is a single point of access to some of the best known websites in the UK, and it takes a special kind of publisher to be part of that mix.
How can you tell if a publisher is the right fit for Ozone?
Our founding publishers in the shape of News UK, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Reach, provide a clear benchmark for the type of publishers we engage with. Our business development team has a clear view of what makes the best partner - new prospects must invest in their content creation and have editorial governance that provides high levels of quality control. Ultimately, the content will engage the reader, and that reader engagement is key to attracting advertisers. Being an advertiser-first business, we can only deliver on our promise to brands when our publishing partners are of the highest quality.
Our publishing partners are also aligned in their view that industry-wide collaboration is key to future success, and to this end we hold regularly advisory councils with our stakeholders to identify new opportunities to present to advertisers.
Ozone reaches pretty much every person in the UK who goes online. What do you see as the benefit of this combined scale versus that of an individual publisher?
The great thing about all our publishers is that they are focused on delivering the best reader experience to keep users engaged longer and more often. From an Ozone perspective we reap the benefit of these high attention moments through a single view of how readers behave across the combined portfolio of more than 90 websites. For example, for someone who might be an avid football reader on The Sun, we are also also able to tell that they are massively environmentally conscious as a result of what they read on The Guardian. We have access to a huge amount of audience and contextual understanding that provides incredibly valuable insights when creating campaigns for our advertisers.
In the past year you’ve onboarded new publishers such as ESI Media, DC Thomson, Stylist and Bauer Media. What do they add to the Ozone story?
In terms of overall scale, the impact is minimal, particularly as our four founding partners had near universal reach of the online population when Ozone first launched. However, the magic sauce is definitely in the depth these new partners add to the proposition. It means that across our platform we are able to see individuals more frequently as they engage more with multiple titles. Through an increased number of touch points we add even more flavour to our reader profiles, through a different content mix, and we can draw even more insights from their behaviours to shape and optimise campaigns. Similarly if you take publishers like Stylist and Bauer whose titles generally attract more women, this provides greater insights and opportunity for, as an example, beauty or fashion clients.
Our alliance becomes stronger as a result of the voices of the many talented people within our publisher network. They bring a huge amount of expertise to help us understand more about what works for their businesses, their readers and, of course, our advertisers.
What Ozone ad products are you excited about launching and activating with your publishers?
We’re currently in the process of rolling out AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages - across the portfolio. This will allow advertisers even more opportunity to engage with users on mobile - something that is particularly valuable when our publishers are delivering record audiences on these devices.
Ozone’s Premium Only Video is another exciting development. While we’ve been able to deliver video campaigns for a while, our proposition is getting even stronger with greater delivery across our publisher network and the growing opportunity to deliver campaigns programmatically. I truly believe that it will be our brand-safe, premium, known environments that will really differentiate Ozone’s offering with advertisers.
Without giving too much away, are there any exciting developments from your area of Ozone that are coming soon that you can reveal?
We’re very excited about the increased investment news that was recently agreed by the Ozone board. This will allow us to accelerate many of the initiatives that will create more opportunities for different advertisers, and reward our publishers for the brilliant content they create. can’t wait to see how our SME offering evolves as this will be something significantly new for a new type of advertising customer and open up new revenue opportunities for our publishers.
As part of our wider operations team, I’m particularly looking forward to the creation of Ozone’s digital advertising centre of excellence and the new talent and expertise that will be joining us to fuel our growth.
And finally, what do you enjoy most about working at Ozone?
Start with a cliche, end with a cliche, but the people at Ozone really make it what it is. I fondly remember the friendly welcome when I first started, and as an ex-pat I love how I can still be my New York-self while working in a UK-run business.
