The Stylist Group has joined The Ozone Project – the fifth addition to the joint digital display ad sales platform and the first new partner in a year since its launch.
Guardian Media Group, News UK, Reach and Telegraph Media Group set up Ozone last year to aggregate their digital display ad inventory and audience data to make it easier for advertisers to buy from one sales point.
The Stylist Group will bring not only its flagship magazine title, Stylist, but it will also "represent" digital inventory from 16 of its sister newspaper and magazine websites from parent company DC Thomson.
Ozone claims to reach 99% of the UK’s online population, or about 44 million every month, through its four founders, whose titles include The Guardian, Daily Mirror, Manchester Evening News, The Sun, The Times, Daily Telegraph and OK!.
Adding The Stylist Group will help to improve "frequency measures as the weekly reach of the platform" with an extra 500,000 adults every week, Ozone said.
"The partnership will also deliver incremental audience intelligence to enrich audience understanding and enable greater contextual ad targeting in these trusted editorial environments."
Damon Reeve, chief executive of Ozone, said: "We have always been very transparent about our desire to create the most effective opportunities for advertisers, and bringing forward-thinking, premium content publishers into our ecosystem can only enrich that offering.
"The great content created by The Stylist Group is hugely complementary to the quality, trusted editorial generated by our founders’ titles on a daily basis."
David Hayter, head of digital, at The Stylist Group, said: "The Stylist Group has always been an advocate for transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem and have found The Ozone Project to closely mirror the values that Stylist has always strived to work towards."
Hayter added that he was looking forward to bringing DC Thomson’s "stable of quality titles", which include the Evening Telegraph in Dundee and the Evening Express in Aberdeen, into Ozone.
Reeve said about 40 advertisers across a wide range of sectors are currently running campaigns on Ozone. About 70 have tried it since launch.
"Quarter on quarter, we’re doubling revenues," he said.
Ozone began trading in September 2018 and Reeve said he was "pretty happy" with its performance over the first year, even though it has been "gritty in parts".
It has taken a year to bring on board a fifth publisher partly because Ozone had to match supply and demand – in terms of the number of advertisers that wanted to use the platform and the amount of potential inventory it made available.
The Stylist Group and DC Thomson have not become a shareholder in Ozone. The four founders each own a quarter.
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