Guardian News & Media, News UK and The Telegraph have announced The Ozone Project, a jointly-owned audience platform.

The publishers said The Ozone Project, currently in Alpha, will offer advertisers and agencies direct and transparent access to an audience of more than 39.4m million unique users in brand-safe, fraud-free, premium environments across the UK’s most trusted publishers.

Launching in Autumn 2018, the project has been developed in response to industry-wide concerns across the digital advertising ecosystem around brand safety, data governance, lack of transparency in the supply chain and ad fraud, as well as calls from advertisers for a single point of access to publisher inventory to facilitate an easy buy for scaled quality.

The Ozone Project will create rich, custom audiences across publishers, leveraging advertisers’ first party CRM data along with publishers’ audiences, and facilitating sophisticated targeting across the combined inventories. By directly connecting brands, agencies and publishers, the companies said, The Ozone Project will create a more transparent view of how segments are structured and where media is running.

Advertisers will be able to access the new platform through a single Ozone Project sales team who will offer access to the joint inventory and data as a managed service or via premium programmatic channels. The ambition is to open the platform up to other quality publishers and partners over time.

“This project has been driven by a shared ethos to create a channel for advertisers to gain direct access to publishers’ audiences at scale via a transparent and effective platform,” said Dominic Carter, group chief commercial officer at News UK.

For The Telegraph, managing director of digital Dora Michail said: “Funding quality journalism is essential for the good of the media industry and society as a whole. The Ozone Project puts in place an infrastructure that creates a better marketplace for advertisers, consumers and publishers alike.”

And Guardian News & Media’s chief revenue officer Hamish Nicklin said: “We are working together to build a better digital ecosystem for advertisers, readers and publishers. The Ozone Project is a response to the challenges we all face and aims to facilitate the highest standard of digital advertising and ensure quality journalism and content continues to be funded.”