Ozone, the digital advertising platform built by publishers, is opening a collaborative research and development centre focused on better understanding how AI technologies may impact future product and commercial models of the publishing and marketing sectors.
Ozone Labs will operate alongside the core business and aims to enable the company and its partners to experiment, to build product prototypes and try new business models, in a sandbox environment and at the pace of LLM evolution.
A key success metric for Labs will be the accelerated delivery of future capabilities back into Ozone’s core advertising platform business.
Collaboration has always been key to Ozone’s way of working, and it believes the industry will move faster if the same challenges are tackled in a more open way.
Leveraging the collaborative aspect of LLM-based technologies, the business insists Ozone Labs marks a conscious shift in how Ozone shares early thinking on new product concepts and commercial models, and involves partners and peers earlier in that development and co-authoring solutions, rather than waiting until work is packaged as a finished product.
Ozone Labs will focus its work across the three areas of research, Labs Live and projects.
It will explore how publishers’ content is sourced, valued and used within LLM ecosystems, with deep-dive research programmes delivered in tandem with individual publishers.
Meanwhile, it will also run partner hackathons co-created with brands, agencies and publishers, where collaborative teams sprint to build working prototypes around shared challenges, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Pilot events are planned in the US and UK.
Finally, an openly accessible collection of prototypes, concepts and evaluations will be developed. Not all will become products, but sharing work-in-progress is central to the Labs ethos, with open-source outputs wherever possible. This will include tests and evaluations of ad-tech innovations such AdCP, arTF.
With over half of Ozone’s workforce working in product, engineering and data roles, the Ozone Labs programme will be run by existing team members with experimentation led by chief technology officer Scott Switzer,
Ozone chief executive Damon Reeve said: “We’re particularly excited to support publishers who are navigating a fundamentally new landscape for how professional content is distributed and monetised. Our experience building data products and technology supporting publisher monetise audience and content in a human web world, provides a starting foundation for tackling the unknowns of the agentic web era – and we want to support our publishing partners on this journey.”
“Similarly, In an increasingly automated world, the human attention and genuine engagement that brands and agencies need from their campaigns becomes more valuable, not less. Ozone Labs is our commitment to ensuring AI amplifies that human connection – for advertisers, agencies and publishers alike – rather than eroding it.”
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