The Ozone Project has bagged a brace of top prizes at this year’s Digiday Media Awards Europe
We are delighted to have ‘done the double’ at this year’s Digiday Media Awards Europe after we picked up two prizes at the leading industry awards bash.
Ozone has been named Best Publisher Platform while our exceptional Publisher Ops Team has picked up the coveted Ad Operations Team of the Year award.
Read the two awards submissions below:
Best Publisher Platform
Created by four leading UK publishers, News UK, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Reach, Ozone is a digital advertising platform designed to help publishers build a more sustainable digital future. The platform, built with flexibility in mind, offers advertisers easy, transparent campaign activations at scale across premium publisher websites. Powering both the demand and supply sides of the business, the platform offers three routes to revenue growth - Managed Demand, Revenue Manager and Biddable Management - with each part designed to put control back in publishers’ hands while bringing them closer to their advertiser partners.
With the platform’s design coming from major publishers, it prioritises maximising the value publishers can retain from their inventory and data. So far, it’s delivering revenue solutions of over 250 UK domains, where it has increased total publisher revenues by over 50% and has driven 65% yield growth from existing programmatic business. With its centralised solutions, the platform has reduced the overall resource footprint required of publishers and has reduced data leakage events by 75%, thanks to its server-side connections. As the platform expands outside the UK, it’s creating global industry change.
Ad Operations Team of the Year
In January 2021, News UK became the first customer for the newly formed Ozone Publisher Operations team - News UK being one of Ozone’s founding publishers, and handing over responsibility for their display and video advertising operations to the team. Ozone responded by building a centre of excellence designed to meet the demands of premium publisher advertising operations. The centre model included Ozone’s team of five managing a News UK sales team of more than 70 across all the publisher’s media brands, understanding historical setups and documentation during a three-month transition within a work-from-home environment and identifying efficiency savings, process improvements and SLAs to meet News UK’s needs. Efficiencies included consolidating setups into a single line item, saving around 10 minutes (impression goal) and 30 minutes (tenancy) per setup and creating time savings of more than 100 hours per month. These time efficiencies across all News UK operations allowed for proactive initiatives throughout 2021, including providing sales with weekly OSIs accompanied by performance commentary and creating technical Operations escalation processes to resolve issues quickly.
Reinvigorating campaign processes had a further impact, reducing the workload on News UK’s sales team, which no longer had to book multiple lines while helping commercial product teams implement brand metrics and in-app video offerings. For News UK, Ozone demonstrated markedly improved results while sales grew significantly, shown by average monthly figures in March-December 2021 versus pre-change averages in January to February 2021. These include order volume lift of 63%, line items to orders efficiency ratio decreasing to 6 to 1 from 8 to 1 and Impressions handled increasing 5x to 290 million. As the go-to operational team for News UK’s business, Ozone’s success is echoed by the publisher expanding the team to eight members, helping drive further operational excellence for clients and partners.
