Four of Britain's biggest publishers built a platform to fight back against platforms.

Ozone is a programmatic advertising platform built for brands by the UK's leading national publishers. Shareholders are The Guardian, News UK, Reach PLC, and The Telegraph. We launched in 2018 to help publishers compete in a programmatic environment dominated by platforms. Platforms have a lot of technology, scale, features, and capabilities that brands and marketers want, that individual publishers struggle to provide alone. Ozone exists to help publishers be more competitive in that platform world, which means investing heavily in technology, tools to control their data, how that data is shared, and how it's monetised. The end is a much better advertising experience for the brand.

The thesis has held. I could pull out the deck from 2017 and it would still be accurate. We just do it a lot more, and a lot more sophisticated. Over half of our people sit in data and technology roles. The platform drives our media business; we also licence the technology back to publishers to help them monetise their own advertising business. Then on the commercial side we have teams going to advertisers and agencies, building relationships, and securing budgets that would otherwise go to platforms. Where we started with four publishers we now work with 45.

Offline publishing is easy to grasp. You walk into a newsagent and you know what you're looking at: a newspaper or a magazine. The digital equivalent doesn't exist. You type a URL, you could be looking at the Wall Street Journal, or you could be looking at a random site producing WSJ-like content under no regulatory oversight. Publishing is not clearly defined in a digital world. For a marketer trying to understand what's driving value, publishing gets lumped in with online display, which is everything from train-ticket sites to calendar websites all the way through to major publishers.

So early on we felt the responsibility to define the ecosystem we operate in. Premium is subjective; it can mean many things to many people, but we had to start somewhere. From a buyer's point of view, the premium web is the editorial environment, the audience, the premium service, the premium formats, the results. It's the whole advertising experience. It's transparent. It's all the things you think it should be when you're buying programmatic advertising. That is our anchor. Four years ago when we started talking about it, people didn't really know what we meant. Now it's clearly understood that there's a version of the web with a different value attached to it, distinct from the whole.

The primary differentiator starts with the audience. People reading news or magazine content are highly engaged and highly attentive. The scroll fatigue of a social feed is the antithesis of what you get when someone is reading long-form content or watching video content. They're very engaged and attentive, which means for brand and upper-funnel strategies, those environments work really well. The challenge is reaching those audiences at scale in a measurable way, and understanding the channel impact softer metrics like attention and engagement have on the harder lower-funnel metrics. Ozone bridges that gap and makes what looks complex much simpler.

For the last fifteen years, programmatic technology has been horizontal in nature. SSP layer, DSP layer, DMP. These technologies are designed to be universal, regardless of the sector they support. What happens is the technologies average out and don't bring out the best in any vertical. News and magazine publishing is a unique beast. Building technology from scratch, purpose-built for that vertical, drives real value. Set against someone whose generic stack provides something that on the face of it is quite similar, being purpose-built from the ground up for publishing drives significant value.

When you design from the ground up only thinking about the premium-web ecosystem you're focused on, you realise quickly how many of the other generic components are broken. Programmatic advertising conceptually is a stack of building blocks and connections; what people don't see under the hood is how many of those connections don't work, or work imperfectly. Being able to make them work properly drives much better value. As a latecomer, we have that as our remit, and we can see the frustrations that have lingered in the older systems with nobody incentivised to solve them.

There was a very specific reason we launched in June 2018: GDPR went live that same month. GDPR was seen as a forcing function for publishers, who were the ones that needed to capture consent for any data to be shared. It was an opportunity for publishers to reverse the tide of disintermediation. That didn't happen. Ad-tech innovations created the consent frameworks, and those frameworks ultimately didn't allow publishers to reverse the tide. At the time we were very involved in the regulated conversations around how data is used. Regulation has become more complex (CMA with the ICO in the UK, the Department of Justice here, and the combinations around competition and data use), so we are now more observers and participants than leaders in those conversations.

The attribution of value for digital advertising, given data regulation and the loss of signal that's set to continue, is forcing marketers to think differently about how they measure success and where value is coming from. That bodes well for publishing and for the premium web, because more old-school methods (marketing mix modelling, econometrics) come back into use to understand where value is being generated. Being able to define that clearly will matter in the next few years.

It's a misnomer that young people don't read news. They read a lot of news, and the research backs that. What they are is less brand-loyal. They will read news content, but they will arrive at it through social platforms or other means. They won't read cover to cover the Times, the Telegraph, or the Guardian. Their loyalty to an individual masthead is low; their consumption of news content is high. From Ozone's perspective, because we look at audiences across all the properties, that doesn't matter. As long as we can find them and reach them for the right brand, they have equal value.

We've been working with US publishers from a software perspective for the last two years, and we're introducing our media proposition through the next year. The UK is a single market geographically and in size. The US is too big to be treated as one. There are regional markets, vertical markets, and the national publisher brands that dominate in the UK are less dominant in the US. There are significant regional brands driving value for marketers. We have to think about the US as not one market but several put together.

The publishing world has many challenges: Google search algorithms, Meta feeds and the way they shape distribution, regulation around consent, the consent-banner conversation. Publishing as a sector has a lot of pressure. All the support we can give to lift the watermark across the sector is valuable. We are now a fairly significant contributor to most of the publishers we work with, and a significant partner for most of the holding groups and independent agencies in the UK. There is still a large amount of value within the premium web that is currently untapped.

The impact of AI (or data technologies and innovation, however we want to frame it) on marketing automation is going to transform most businesses. The speed with which we can innovate and bring things to market from a data point of view is mind-boggling, and that's only going to continue. In media planning, measurement data is going to convert into planning data that immediately transfers into execution. The full sequence is going to collapse down. If that's true, then the most important thing is having clear signals, good data, well-structured business logic, and well-structured supply chains, so that when those algorithms work out how they're measuring success and what the next planning cycle looks like, you're in the best position to create value.

If the category is clearly defined, more spend will flow to it because the value is demonstrable, distinct from everything that isn't premium. That is currently difficult to see when people look at online display as a single bucket containing everything from the train-ticket site to the WSJ.