Celebrating five years of Ozone with five days of commentary from our brilliant team.
As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Ozone’s launch, we’ve asked our team for their thoughts and opinions on the different things that have made for memorable moments across the years. Today, we’re going to focus on the things that have made Ozoners most proud – and here are our top five!
First up is one of our earliest proud moments when we welcomed The Stylist Group as our first non-founder publisher into our UK alliance. Even though our official PR date was Halloween 2019, there was nothing spooky about this announcement. As Dipti, our business development lead said, “this was such a significant milestone for all of us and our mission of building a platform to support the publishing industry beyond our news brand founders”. Nearly four years and many more new partners later, the team at Stylist (along with many others) remain incredibly important and collaborative partners – thank you for your continued support!
31st October 2019, and The Stylist Group signs up as Ozone’s first non-founder publishing partner
Next is our story of defying the odds and thriving during a time of global flux. In the same way many others faced, COVID 19 and the subsequent lockdowns had the potential to completely stall our growth at a time when we were still relatively small and arguably not stable enough to take such a dramatic hit. As our CFO Nick commented, “At first I was worried the business wouldn’t survive the first lockdown, but instead we absolutely thrived and grew during this period because people focused on the numbers, building products and supporting each other”. The focus on numbers, product and support remains just as important today.
Lockdown 2020 – when virtual work, meetings and celebrations became the norm!
Third, our team is very proud of the growth we’ve seen from both the business and our team. Whether that’s Bill and Dougie calling out the growth of our regional ad business – up nearly 10x in year one and 3x in year two – or Tom highlighting a near 6x growth in revenue and engagement with one of his agencies. This isn’t stuff that happens overnight, as Andy our business intelligence head remembers, “I feel really proud to have been part of the Ozone journey from the beginning, watching the company grow from a few people in a serviced office, to more than 100 today”. For Rob, one of the campaign managers in our Operations team, that journey of growth was one that saw his secondment turn into a full time Ozoner role in January 2022 – “I was very excited about starting a new chapter.”
CTRL 3; Danny, Dipti and Shankar prepare to take to the stage at our publisher showcase
Our fourth pillar of proudness focuses on how we push each other to do things better and differently. Reminiscing on the time when she had to do an all-agency presentation on-stage, Angela, one of our senior agency partners talked about the support she had from the team as she got behind the mic and how “it felt great to push myself out of my comfort zone”. Similarly, Shankar, our lead product manager, got up on a cinema stage to present results from our study into the effectiveness of different identity solutions to a packed room of publishers, while Neya, one of our campaign executives, wowed everyone with her presentation skills at an all-company town hall. The push to do better and differently can be seen in many different parts of the business; whether it’s the 100+ issues of Reading the Nation Alex has curated, the ‘In the Knowzone’ newsletters Maria creates for our ops customers or the amazing success seen with our segmentation reengineering by our very talented tech team.
Ozone Sports Day 2023: Team work makes the fancy-dress dream work
Finally, and saving the best for last, our people have a huge amount of pride in our team mentality. The word ‘together’ is a very deliberately chosen word (by our team) in our company values – as Carly our client services executive said, “the closeness keeps us going through busy periods to deliver fantastic customer results.” Craig, our CRO, pointed out that everyone at Ozone “definitely plays their part”, while Stephen, our programmatic sales lead and one of our newest colleagues summed it up beautifully – “Ozone’s team mentality and togetherness is on a level I’ve never seen before”.
We’ll drink to that! Here’s to five more years of creating really proud moments together.