The addition of Reach plc’s audience means The Ozone Project will now offer advertisers and agencies direct and transparent access to a digital audience of more than 42.5 million British consumers and puts their monthly UK reach on par with Facebook, says The Ozone Project.
Reach’s involvement in the project will bring even greater scale to Ozone’s audience, giving advertisers access to “brand safe, fraud free, premium environments” across four of the UK’s largest publishers.
The project has been developed in response to industry-wide concerns across the digital advertising ecosystem around brand safety, data governance, lack of transparency in the supply chain and ad fraud, as well as calls from advertisers for a single point of access to publisher inventory to facilitate an easy buy for scaled quality.
The Ozone Project says it will create rich, custom audiences across publishers – leveraging advertisers’ first party CRM data along with publishers’ audiences and facilitating sophisticated targeting across the combined inventories. By directly connecting brands, agencies and publishers, The Ozone Project will create a more transparent view of how segments are structured and where media is running.
Advertisers will be able to access the new platform through a single specialised Ozone Project sales team who will offer access to the joint inventory and data as a managed service or via premium programmatic channels.
Due to launch this autumn and currently in closed beta, the ambition is to open the platform up to other quality publishers and partners over time.
Damon Reeve, CEO, The Ozone Project, said: “The ambition for The Ozone Project was always for it to be a truly cross-industry initiative and Reach’s involvement underlines this vision. With four of the largest newspaper publishers in the UK now on board we can offer advertisers and agencies a unique combination of technology and targeting alongside direct and transparent access to quality audiences at real scale.”
Andy Atkinson, Chief Revenue Officer, Reach plc said: “Having completed our recent acquisition of the Northern & Shell titles, we are delighted to confirm our involvement in The Ozone Project. We passionately believe in the importance of news brands and their value to consumers but also to advertisers and are excited about working with the team and the other newsbrands to expand on that vision.
“We have long believed and championed the need for publishers to collaborate meaningfully in order to provide brands the ability to reach consumers at scale and effectively and The Ozone Project is a significant, and natural, next step on that journey.”
