2023’s been one heck of a year – we’ve grown our team, launched a bunch of new stuff, won some big awards and celebrated our fifth birthday. Here’s a little reminder about the past year at Ozone
It’s truly been a milestone year for Ozone. We turned five, grew our team, won a bunch of prestigious awards, launched heaps of cool new stuff and delivered more than ever for brands, agencies and publishers.
Turning 5 in style
This year, we celebrated our fabulous fifth year in typical Ozone fashion with parties, promotions, roadshows and more.
The celebrations started in early summer with The Leaders Lunch, an exclusive event for our senior supporters from across the media industry. Then, in a very special content series for The Media Leader, our own leadership team opined on the value the premium web – powered by Ozone – will create for brands and publishers alike.
Throughout July, August and September we also welcomed back Ozzy the Ozone bunny – star of our Easter promotion U OK Bun – for three promotional games. Almost 500 individuals from across our UK advertisers, agencies and publishers played Sun’s Out, Bun’s Out, which made our 30+ lucky winners very happy.
We wrapped up our fifth birthday bonanza with two huge parties – THE DI5CO BALL events in London and Manchester – and our Five to Thrive agency roadshow, which will continue into 2024.
Growing our team
2023 has seen stellar growth for our people. We’ve brilliantly bolstered our award-winning team and said hello to some serious new talent. Earlier this year, Stephen Windegaard and Jhan Hancock-Rushton joined our commercial leadership team as Programmatic Sales Lead and Client Director respectively.
More recently Phil Quy, Hannah Palmer, Frankie Berger, Khanya Pama, Noah Farmery, Hugo Altman, Eddie Cunningham-Hill and Zoe Rutherford all established themselves as front office rockstars.
Exciting new launches
It’s been a year of new things from the Ozone team – and we are particularly proud of two initiatives.
First, and following our commitment to make our platform carbon net zero by 2030, we kicked off our ECOzone sustainability programme with the launch of a new, freely available measure to quantify carbon impact of the campaigns we deliver. The initial launch was followed by an ECOzone event in the summer.
More recently Studiozone, our in-house creative studio charged with maximising ad impact for brands across the premium web, launched. Studiozone combines bespoke creative solutions with our unrivalled reach, context and audience insights to “deliver even better results for our partners,” our CRO Craig Tuck said at launch.
It’s been a busy start for life at Studiozone with Creative Solutions Designer Alex Smith and Design Lead Gwen Glynn involved in dozens of pitches in the pre-Christmas rush.
New publishers partners
Finally, among the many new publishers we’ve welcomed to Ozone since our launch at Cannes Lions five years ago, the additions we made in 2023 include some of our most exciting. Thanks to our brilliant Publisher Services team, we’ve seen the likes of MailMetroMedia, PinkNews and Our Media joining Ozone to boost our premium web proposition, offering both huge scale and access to more diverse audiences.
Additionally, our award-winning technology Ozone Smart Bidstream is now also being used by a host of publishers in the UK and international markets, growing our overall publisher count by more than 50% in the past 12 months.
Industry recognition
Finally, we’ve been truly honoured to receive a wide range of industry accolades for the work we do. December’s recent Sales Team of the Year win at the Drum Awards for Digital Advertising, capped off another year of fabulous industry accolades. At the same awards, Ozone Smart Bidstream was highly commended in the Game-Changing Technology category.
It caps another remarkable year of recognition from the industry during which Ozone has picked up major honours at the Media Leaders Awards (Tech Company of the Year; Tech CEO of the Year, Damon Reeve), The Drum Online Media Awards (Commercial Team of the Year; Best Technical Innovation, Ozone Smart Bidstream – highly commended), the AOP Digital Publishing Awards (Digital Publishing Innovation, Ozone Smart Bidstream), the Manchester Publicity Awards (Media Sales Team of the Year) and The Wires Awards (Best New Product or Service – Sell Side, Ozone Smart Bidstream).
Thank you for your support
We’d like to thank you – our advertiser clients, agency partners and publishers – for your continued support throughout 2023. We wish you a restful festive break and look forward to doing it all again in 2024.
