Ozone Media is changing its name to Adadyn and expanding into the US market.
The company, which started out as an ad network for India and the Asia-Pacific region, retired that business last year. It provides programmatic solutions to medium-size buyers.
“There are a number of agencies that don’t have access to these tools and are losing their customers because of the cost of access,” CEO Kiran Gopinath said.
Adadyn intends to be the access point for buyers whose budgets are too small to justify the expensive technology licenses to access programmatic inventory. It charges them a percentage of media that flows through the platform.
Adadyn expects its sweet spot to be buyers with annual budgets ranging from $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Clients include smaller independent trading desks, such as Programmatic Mechanics, and mid-size and smaller agencies across the US.
“For any small advertiser or agency, we’re really an end-to-end platform, which enables people to target the audience appropriately based on what interest they have, on the media they’re on,” Gopinath said.
It uses AppNexus to access that programmatic inventory, but expects to announce additional DSP partnerships in the future. Gopinath clarified that the company is not a DSP, but rather a “meta-DSP” that provides access to these buy tools.
While Gopinath claimed Adadyn is the top independent programmatic player in the APAC region, that market is nascent and “slow to pick up,” he said, which is why the company is looking to more mature markets for growth.
In contrast, US revenue grew 400% last year, so 75% of Adadyn’s revenue now comes from the US market. The company has decided to focus on building up its client base and revenue in a market where it’s already gained so much traction.
By the end of the year, its on-the-ground US presence will go from three to about 15 to 20 employees, with the majority of US hires going to sales, marketing and business development. Engineering and operations will remain in India.
Along with the name change, the company is rolling out two technology features to the US market after testing them in the APAC markets: dynamic creative optimization and audience management capabilities.
With dynamic creative optimization, Adadyn can enable custom messages (like product-specific ads) to individual users. Audience management gives brands similar granularity of targeting and focus around its audience segments.
“We think these platforms will create a moment where it’s not just the big players [using programmatic], but a level playing field,” Gopinath said. “If you don’t have to buy technology, you can go out and compete with the best of the best.”
