Kerri Elstub is one of the rarest types of employees that can be found in 21st Century Australia: the loyal kind. Now in her 23rd year at Nine, Elstub cut her teeth for a few years in talkback radio before switching employers for the first and only time in her life.
“I’m a Nine person through and through,” she tells B&T proudly. “I spent about 18 years in television and absolutely loved it. Everything from the TODAY show, Weekend Today, to the Kerri-Anne Show and then A Current Affair.”
She made the jump to digital six years ago and is currently the director of nine.com.au, home to Nine’s suite of websites including 9honey.com.au, 9news.com.au, WWOS.com.au and Nine’s TV show sites.
How did you find the switch from television to digital?
I think both are fast-paced, the television world and the digital world. A Current Affair is truly the best training ground in the world for any journalist. My six years there were some of the best of my life. I think it puts you in really good stead because A Current Affair knows its audience and it knows Australia. I think I was able to bring a lot of that across to digital and put on a different lens – a consumer lens – which I hadn’t seen a lot of in digital before.
That is especially so now with interest rate rises and cost of living pressures – issues that are just as valid today as when I started back on A Current Affair 12 years ago.
Six years into nine.com.au, how are you enjoying it?
It’s a privilege to run this part of the business. Digital is such a massive part of what Nine does as a company. It is ever-changing, ever-expanding.
We are sitting in verticals from news to sport, lifestyle to entertainment, property, and now the e-commerce and affiliate marketing sites we run. We touch every part of people’s lives with Nine’s content, so it’s an exciting space to be in. Add the Olympics deal on top and nine.com.au is in a truly unique position to succeed.
What parts of the broader Nine business do you collaborate with most?
We work with a lot of the broadcast brands such as 9News, TODAY and A Current Affair because we look after their websites and online content. We also work closely with 9Now, Stan, Domain, Drive and all other parts of Nine.
Nine.com.au has a way to go to catch News.com.au.
We have a huge audience around the country. More than 10 million* Australians visit us each month. Yes, we have some big competitors, but I’m focused on our sites and what we do well.
Take lifestyle, for instance. Six years after launching, our women’s lifestyle network 9Honey is still the most engaged lifestyle website in the country. People spend more time on 9Honey than on any of our competitor sites. That’s what we want as content creators and that’s what advertisers want too. Big numbers don’t mean anything if people don’t spend real time engaging with your content.
What do you think is your secret sauce?
I have an incredible team of editors who know their audience and their product. We’ve always said that people come to us for news and stay for everything else. People are suffering with news fatigue at the moment, which is a trend we are seeing globally. People are increasingly looking for different kinds of content and that’s what we provide.
Across Nine, we call our product offering Total Publishing. Our content is complementary, not in competition with our stablemates like The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review. We consider our brands to be superbrands.
To use a travel analogy, we talk about filling every seat on the plane. So, no matter what your budget, what your destination is, there’s a different brand within Nine’s Total Publishing community to fill that need. And we’re certainly seeing a lot of interest in the travel space and lifestyle in general. Sport too is on the rise with the Olympic Games coming to Nine over the next decade.
How do you decide which vertical to enter?
It’s a combination of trusting your gut, knowing your audience and speaking with the commercial team. I consider myself to be a soccer mum from the suburbs, first and foremost.
I feel that I know our audience because I am our audience. I know what’s being discussed at the school gate, I know what my husband, who is a builder, is telling me, I know what my girlfriends are talking about, and I’ve got teenage kids and 20-year-old nieces. So I know what they’re consuming. I know what their lives look like, I know the platforms they’re on. I think about all those things and have the right conversations with the right people before we look at spinning up those sites.
How important are TV shows to your content?
There are probably 20 TV show websites within the entertainment category that we run. But that’s the unique thing about nine.com.au. We get to represent all those mega TV brands in the digital world.
The recent series of Married at First Sight was a perfect example of how our audience is so hungry for content on the couples and how they’re doing throughout the season. We’re also focusing on how Karl and Sarah are setting the agenda for the day on TODAY and how Ally Langdon is breaking stories on A Current Affair.
Really, that is our unique selling point: we have the content and the access that our competitors want. They are following us. They’re writing up MAFS. They’re writing up who Ally has spoken to on A Current Affair or what Ben Fordham has said on 2GB (Nine radio). To be able to work with and digitally represent the best content in Australia makes my job the best job in media.
*Source: Roy Morgan Research; People 14+ for the 12 months ending December 2022
