Tipping the balance: Conquering the ad tech ecosystem with Content Ignite
About 20 years ago, James Hanslip was working as commercial director for a magazine publisher when he was faced with the challenging task of transforming the business from print to digital. As he looked for advertising tech partners, frustration started to set in.
“I found working with ad tech vendors very complicated and very time consuming,” he recalls. “Everyone sort of promised the world and delivered little, which hasn’t changed a great deal, I’ll be honest.
“That was one of the reasons why I thought – wouldn’t it be great if we could actually build a business that could deliver something that publishers wanted?”
The result of that realisation is Content Ignite, a company co-founded by Hanslip and Ben Spencer (who both worked at Imagine Publishing) that “tips the balance back in the publisher’s favour” when negotiating the complexities of the ad tech ecosystem. Through its cutting-edge Fusion platform, publishers can take complete control over on-page monetisation, ad technology and ad management, using one tag.
We caught up with Hanslip, CEO of Content Ignite, to talk about making ad tech simpler, why customer service is the ultimate canary in a coal mine, and the challenges facing digital publishing in 2026 and beyond.
What would say are the biggest developments influencing digital publishing at the moment?
Well, the influence of AI is obviously massive and tackling the traffic impact of that.
The single biggest influence I’d say on our publishers has been the AI overviews that rolled out about September last year. I even spoke to Google about this recently in our quarterly review. They asked: How can we help you for the next year? I said: Stop AI overviews for one! That would be a good start. But really, I think pre-Christmas, everybody could just see danger everywhere because all you were seeing is this slide (in traffic). I feel, after Christmas, people are starting to understand what those risks are and how to mitigate for them. For the good publishers with good quality traffic that aren’t overly reliant on Google, the big thing is going to be: how do we make more money from less? You have an issue with ‘shrinkflation’ where we’re going to get less inventory, but can we actually get advertisers paying more for that inventory, which is something we want to do. How can we get more direct spend funnelling into publishers? I think the biggest single problem is how do they stem their traffic flow issues and how can they make more from less? And I feel like we’re now getting more of a handle on it. The shrieking has stopped a little bit and it’s a case of – how do we actually fix this problem rather than everything’s doom and gloom.
I want to take you back to when you first launched Content Ignite in 2014. Could you tell me more about what prompted you to start the company?
We wanted to see if we could fix some of the problems that we felt we were seeing on a daily basis ourselves by actually building out a platform that publishers could run their whole business from. And it’s an agnostic platform. We’re not pushing a publisher any which way. We’ve built a platform that’s essentially a market, but we’ve aggregated all those ad tech vendors into one marketplace that they can activate through our platform and through our technology.
You have a great calling card in Fusion. What makes it such a gamechanger?
You’re always getting pushed one way or the other when you’re working with ad tech vendors and for us, that whole agnostic play was really big. We think ad tech is actually getting way more complex, not simpler. It’s our job to be at the coalface of what’s going on and to know what the next big thing is coming down the track. For a publisher, however, it’s tough to keep on top of all these things. We found that, of the publisher we work with, pretty much 80% don’t even keep Prebid up to date, which is something that should be relatively easy to do. So, Fusion allows publishers to do that, and everything else, in one place through one platform. We can manage their whole ad stack. They basically deploy our wrapper. Within that wrapper, it’s one line of code that goes on the site, so there’s no sort of custom development work that needs to happen. Then we have all the publishing tools and ad tech vendors from that one line of code, so you’ve cut down a lot of costs for the publisher. They can then let us manage everything for them and we are just an extension of their team. But really, where we’re seeing a lot of the growth – certainly with bigger tier one customers and slightly more mature tier twos – is they want to take our platform, and they want to actually implement it themselves. They want to run everything themselves. So, they want to plug their own connections in and cut their own contracts with whoever and basically use Fusion to be able to do that, which is really powerful.
So, being agile when it comes to integration has been key to help you grow?
Yes, agility has definitely allowed us to grow the business. Everybody should have a fairly similar ad stack, but whenever we pull the curtains back, we find that different things have been added over time. We look at it and go, bloody hell, we need to get in and fix this. So being agile has allowed us to find solutions and build something custom for publishers to integrate. Generally, we do an analysis up front, and we find out what the problems are that publishers have. And we’ll come back with a solution to say: hey, look, we think we can do this. It can be modular. They might want to use some part of our technology and not other bits and then switch that on at a later date.
What were some of the obstacles you faced building the business?
When we were starting out, I would say size and scale. The market we were moving into had a lot of big US incumbents that really dominate that US market. Then you’ve got some really great partners in Europe that are all trying to move into the UK. We always wanted to bootstrap this and build the business and not actually go and get investment. We’ve been down that route before – getting investment – and it was a horrible mistake that we made by getting into bed with the wrong investor. And that really set us up for the future in terms of thinking – right, let’s do this ourselves. I think when you’re starting out, it’s about winning the first one or two landmark clients you can then build around. And then it’s a lot about momentum. When other people start to see good things happening with a vendor, they start to get on board and go, actually, yeah, we’d like to give you guys a try. So, I think it’s taken us a few years to really win those clients, get them to stick, get them saying good things about us, and starting to build a bit of a community around the business.
Are there any case studies you can share?
Sure, Times Higher Education basically had a setup that needed a bit of work.
They were paying another company a lot of money to be able to run their stack.
They weren’t really getting the tools and the features and the revenue performance they wanted. And they really wanted to be able to have a technology partner that could help them manage their direct campaigns. It’s super important at the moment since publisher traffic is on the wane, generally. So, they’ve got to make more from less and just had a very unsophisticated setup around their direct. We helped to enrich their inventory, and the stats are mind blowing – they got a 900% revenue uplift from implementing the technology to allow them to plug in this direct demand layer seamlessly that they couldn’t do before.
One of your business mantras is not to go into your shell during times of uncertainty, which seems like particularly good advice during these volatile times.
Yes, that’s a business mantra that we’ve always stuck to just because I think the businesses that tend to come out at the back of any sort of depression or issue – it’s almost the furnace where the next generation of companies are forged. There’s loads of stuff going on but publishers just need to be as open to ideas as possible and look at ways to reshape their businesses.
Content Ignite has been included in the 2026 edition of The Sunday Times 100 Tech – the only advertising technology business listed. How much has it been a team effort?
All of it. When we started, we were smaller than everybody else, so our USP, alongside the technology, has been customer service. We were publishers ourselves. We know how to transact with publishers. We’ve got an amazing team and the last three years in a row, our customer service has been rated five out of five. That’s almost like the canary in the coal mine for us. If that starts to go down, then we’ve got problems. So, that’s been the main driver and it’s allowed us to retain business and also grow a lot of business through word of mouth. And we don’t always say everything’s great. You know, if something is not working or there are issues, we confront those with our customers and deal with those, which always stands in good stead.
What is your advice to publishers when it comes to managing their ad stacks in 2026?
I would say, take a long, hard look at your ad stack. Don’t be afraid to RFP and actually go to market for something that could potentially future proof your ad stack. I think from our experience, the majority of the ad stacks that we come across could do with some work. And I think there are lots of third parties out there who can come in and help. So, I’d say, keep your eye and ears open. If I was a publisher, I’d be immersing myself in absolutely everything that’s going on right now. Just immerse yourself in all the new things that are coming out because it’s moving ridiculously fast.
