The Ozone Project: for advertisers, publishers and readers
Transparency, greater control and better user experience.
By Sarah Emler | Oct 18, 2018
Picture this: Your article tackles obesity around the world, and next to it you find an advertisement promoting a fast food chain. What can you do?
Currently, four major UK media outlets – the Telegraph, News UK, The Guardian and Reach – have joined forces to create the Ozone Project. The Ozone Project promises direct and transparent access to the audience for advertisers, fraud-free advertising for publishers, and better user experience for the audience.
Ad fraud – up or down?
Ad fraud is a critical matter in the industry, despite it’s reduction from $7.2 billion in the year 2016 to $6.5 billion in 2017. However, Adobe saw that 28% of its traffic was “non-human”, thus, fraudulent. Because of this, Bob Hoffman, author of the Ad Contrarian, calculated that in 2018 ad fraud will rise up to $66 billion in 2018. A challenge advertisers and publishers face, and against which some publishers are proactively fighting.
We spoke to CEO Damon Reeve about the challenges in the ad industry and how the Ozone Project seeks to solve them.
1. Advertisers: Gain transparency
The Ozone Project promises advertisers “greater choice in how they can directly buy premium audiences in transparent and known environments.” Via the project and its four publishing partners, the advertising companies will have access to more than 39.4m users for now, which promises better targeting and transparency.
Advertisers will have the ability to independently verify that they are getting what they paid for. It’s completely transparent on price and telling the advertisers where the inventory is going to be running.”
Damon Reeve, CEO, The Ozone Project
2. Publishers will have more ad control
Publishers have a high responsibility when it comes to ad placement. The Ozone project gives them “greater control of how their advertising business operates.”
Meaning it will be easier for publishers to choose the right advertisement, but at the same time, they will have access to its data to run analytics. “It helps them understand better, how advertising works and performs on their site.” Until now, the data information has been owned by the advertising companies.
3. Audience will experience better targeting and faster loading pages
“The effect for the audience is – we hope – a better user experience. Through better targeted and more relevant advertising”, says Reeve. In addition, the page should load faster. “One of the main reasons why pages load slowly is because there is a lot of advertising code and tracking code that has to load on the webpage.
Ozone plans to move the majority of the code to the server which will clean up the webpage and ultimately make it run a lot faster.”
“No one wants inappropriate ads to appear alongside the wrong content,” says Reeve. This cross-industry initiative will try to solve it, starting with four outlets for now but open to expanding even further.
Find out more about the happenings in the industry