Guest · Publishers and media owners
Damon Reeve
Chief Executive Officer, Ozone
Damon Reeve, CEO of Ozone, co-founded the platform in 2018 on a simple thesis: the publishers who produced the journalism that held democracy together were losing the programmatic advertising market to platforms, not because their audiences were less valuable, but because they had no technology to compete. Ozone was built by publishers, for publishers, to power what Damon calls the premium web.
About
Damon Reeve is the CEO of Ozone, the programmatic advertising platform built by and for the UK’s leading national publishers. Founded in 2018, Ozone’s shareholders include The Guardian, News UK, Reach, and The Telegraph. The platform now works with 45 publishers, over half the company works in data and technology roles, and Ozone is in the process of expanding its media proposition into the US market.
Damon is Australian, and began his digital career in the late 1990s at Microsoft’s ninemsn joint venture before moving to the UK. He co-founded Unanimis, an ad network that he ran for ten years and sold to France Telecom. From within that business the technology that became OpenX was built, and Damon has remained a Board Director of OpenX since 2006. He subsequently ran Authenticated Digital and Hereford Technologies, both focused on advertising technology and data quality, before returning to London to found Ozone.
Ozone launched in June 2018 deliberately timed to coincide with GDPR, on the theory that data regulation would force publishers to clarify the value of their first-party data and reverse the tide of disintermediation. That reversal has been slower than anticipated, but Damon’s conviction that purpose-built vertical technology beats horizontal generic platforms has been consistently borne out. More than half of Ozone’s team works in data and technology, and its focus on building exclusively for the premium publishing ecosystem has enabled innovations that generalist platforms have no incentive to pursue.
Career29 years
- 2018 to now Ozone CEO and co-founder
- 2006 to now OpenX Board Director
- 2014 to 2018 Authenticated Digital Hereford Technologies
- 2008 to 2011 Unanimis CEO
Show earlier roles: Unanimis, Excite Europe, ninemsn (Microsoft)
- 2001 to 2008 Unanimis Operations Director
- 1998 to 1999 Excite Europe Head of Marketing
- 1997 to 1998 ninemsn (Microsoft) Online Marketing Manager
How Damon thinks3 convictions
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The premium web needs a definition or it gets lost
Ozone’s single most important marketing decision was to define what it was defending. The premium web is not a vague quality indicator. Damon is precise about it: premium environments, premium audiences, premium service, premium formats, premium results, and premium transparency. By hammering that same definition for four years, the concept now lands clearly for buyers who previously lumped publishers in with online display, which covers everything from train ticket sites to national newspapers. Definition preceded monetisation.
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Purpose-built vertical technology beats generic horizontal platforms
Generic SSPs, DSPs, and DMPs are designed to work across every market and therefore optimise for no single one. Ozone was built exclusively for premium publishing, and building from that constraint revealed, within months, how many connections in the standard programmatic stack work imperfectly. A platform with no legacy incentive to leave those imperfections in place could simply fix them. Damon’s conviction is that this will continue to hold: the vertical-specific platform will always outperform the horizontal one for any buyer or seller operating in a defined ecosystem.
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Data regulation is an opportunity for publishers, not a threat
The thesis at Ozone’s founding was that forcing consent back to the source, the publisher, would create the conditions for publishers to compete. That has been partially vindicated and partially frustrated. But Damon’s broader point holds: as third-party data degrades, the value of first-party publisher data grows, and methods like mixed media modelling and econometrics that reward high-quality engaged audiences become the dominant measurement frameworks. Publishers who have clearly defined environments and consent-based data are better positioned in that world, not worse.
