Ozone impressed the jury with their continued focus on incremental innovation and by this responsible response to increasing industry expectations that we all need to work towards a more sustainable digital publishing industry.

Ozone Smart Bidstream is a game changing innovation to help publishers generate up to 70% more revenue from existing open market programmatic (OMP) advertising connections – all through an easy integration with their current set ups.

Where adtech solutions create and extract publisher value, this unique publisher-built technology – designed with Ozone’s partners – helps publishers create and retain value within their ecosystems by increasing match-rates and optimising presentation of product to buyers, all while mitigating against the leakage of high value user data in the programmatic auction. Ozone Smart Bidstream puts publishers fully in control of the monetisation of their digital assets.

Despite rapid advertising growth, many persistent issues continue to impact premium publishers across the digital ecosystem. In particular, while programmatic advertising has seen inventory sold-through, it has valued publisher environment and context way below its worth. Coupled with ongoing leakage of highly valued first-party data, publishers needed to take greater control of their digital assets.

A key step in this journey is reducing reliance on open market programmatic, the key driver of discounted audience access – yet switching off presents short-term revenue risk. To mitigate this risk, Ozone innovated with their publishers to create new proprietary publisher technology – Ozone Smart Bidstream.

The team focused on four objectives for this technology:

1. Maximise publisher revenue through increased OMP addressability, optimising bid request presentation with greater publisher distribution controls.
2. Maintaining user privacy through publisher controls that manage the flow of their users’ raw data to upstream technologies.
3. Easy integration by designing as an enhancement, not replacement, for existing publisher setups.
4. Minimising environmental impact by limiting the number of requests sent out, and only to those with the highest buying propensity.

Ozone Smart Bidstream is built around three core components:

Firstly, IDENTIFY is designed to increase addressability, help publishers monetise unknown users and significantly reduce data leakage. It means publisher’s first-party data is never passed to upstream ad partners, while also increasing match-rates from c.40% to over 75%. This means more bids on inventory – especially for non-cookied users.

Secondly, through advanced machine learning, CURATE optimises the presentation of every bid request sent to make it as valuable and attractive to buyers as possible. This triggers a profound shift in buyers' valuation of inventory, meaning more bids, and bids of higher value.

Finally, in a publisher programmatic first, DISTRIBUTE offers distribution strategy through a control framework enabling the publisher to determine what to sell to whom, where, and at what price. As the technology shows buyers more of what they value and less of what they don’t – while also reducing opportunity for those who have low purchase propensity – this subsequently leads to more frequent, more valuable buyer bidding behaviour.

Ozone Smart Bidstream is a critical technology for many of Ozone’s publishers, having proven to deliver up to 70% uplift in total programmatic revenues. The results below are from a large global publisher with a sophisticated programmatic strategy and SSP stack, measured via their own framework:

• +15% increase in total programmatic revenue for the publisher (including AdX).
• Safari revenue grew +40%, with revenue from the Apple browser growing at a rate 2.5x greater than total revenue.
• OMP addressability increased +67% meaning more bid requests of value delivered to ad partners.
• Buyer bid rates increased +39%, while the average bid value (CPM) increased +144%.
• The monetisation delta between Chrome and Safari browsers halved from 60% to >30%.
• No publisher first-party IDs were shared with ad partners, while third-party IDs shared were reduced by 60%.

Put into context, Ozone Smart Bidstream represents a multi-million pound annual revenue uplift for this publisher.

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