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Platform Fueled by

Cloud Optimization

Discover how Ozone optimized their cloud environment and redirected RoS (Return on Savings) to power the premium web, delivering a scalable platform and digital display marketplace for advertisers, and high attention solutions with reach across premium brands in the UK.

Stats

55%

Savings on EC2

44m

Attentive Readers

1.4b+

Monthly Client Traffic

100+ Employees | Headquarters: London, United Kingdom | Industry: Advertising | Service: AWS EC2

Company: Delivering Advertising Attention to Premium UK Digital Publications

Founded in 2018, Ozone has revolutionized premium web advertising in the UK, by bringing advertisers and publishers closer together in a fully transparent and trusted digital environment, and connecting brands with a vast and attentive online audience. Partnering with trusted publications like The Times, The Guardian, and more, Ozone delivers 1.4 billion monthly page views and leverages first-party data for precise consumer targeting. High-impact ad formats and innovative strategies ensure exceptional results, while Ozone Ad Manager platform offers exclusive insights and rapid activations.

Situation / Opportunity: Optimizing Ozone's Platform for Expanding Reach and Content

Ozone offers its content partners the platform, tools, services and expertise to take greater control of their highly valued advertising inventory and data assets. Built post-GDPR, The Ozone uses an unrivaled wealth of first-party, fully compliant publisher data to inform and deliver targeted advertiser campaigns. Ozone leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to dynamically scale their platform to support campaigns across 150+ leading online publisher brands. Specifically, Ozone leverages native AWS services like EC2 to drive core business applications, client operations and ensure a seamless advertising delivery platform.

As the platform grew, it was beginning to become more challenging to achieve peak platform performance goals. Manual processes that were labor-intensive, time-consuming, and did not yield significant business value were hindering development efforts. As such, Ozone was running a highly functional but unoptimized AWS environment, resulting in unnecessary spend and budget overruns.

To fully optimize and address engineering bottlenecks, Ozone invested in automation, initially adopting open-source cloud optimization tools. Nevertheless, data collection, monitoring, and analysis still required manual intervention to execute the recommendations. Seeking the benefits of an optimized environment, but with automated outcomes, Ozone reached out to Usage AI to explore their Clear Savings product. Usage AI were able to perform an initial assessment on potential AWS optimization opportunities. This included a simple savings test through read only access for a sample account, which yielded some significant initial optimization recommendations. As a result, Ozone moved forward with implementing Usage AI's Clear Savings product across their entire AWS environment.

Solution: Dynamic Adjustment of Ozone's technology platform

Ozone constantly builds and iterates on AWS and has an architecture that is simple yet powerful, and easy to maintain and develop on. Recognizing a need for flexible handling of dynamic workloads, particularly data analytics, they opted for Usage, an adaptive cloud management and optimization platform.

Furthermore, by incorporating the Usage EC2 optimization and observability product, Ozone is able to address two core technology and business operational pillars;

Flexibility: Usage's algorithms analyzed the customer's environment and the AWS RI Marketplace, enabling real-time adjustments without being locked into specific instance types for extended periods.
Visibility: Usage enables Ozone to optimize instance efficiency and achieve their cloud cost KPIs. Onboarding was seamless, with security concerns addressed through limited permissions. Immediate savings were realized post-deployment.

Results: Streamlined Operations and increasing ROI

After implementing Usage.AI, Ozone achieved an outstanding 55% spend reduction in their On-Demand compute spend, effortlessly surpassing their “cloud cost per customer” goal, a key financial KPI. Moreover, Usage AI's self-service management capabilities and continuous optimization algorithm ensured infrastructure adjustments aligned with workload demands, freeing Ozone's DevOps Engineers from laborious tasks, enabling the team to focus on innovation and improving platform performance and adding new features and functionality.

In an increasingly competitive digital advertising landscape, Ozone has been able to differentiate by building a cloud-enabled platform that has delivered high attention, display advertising across their sites and has been proven to receive +51% more attention than ads on other websites, and twice as much for video solutions.