Nine will make the buying of television easier and is set to provide both marketers and their agencies with far greater certainty around the delivery of audiences through its new programmatic platform, 9Galaxy.

Michael Stephenson, chief sales officer of Nine, used the company’s Upfront & Personal event at The Star in Sydney today to announce that the broadcaster is partnering with both the Australian-based Landsberry & James and global technology platform Landmark, who will supply individual components of its programmatic advertising platform 9Galaxy, which will go live in February 2017.

“9Galaxy will change the way our clients and our agency partners buy television,” said Mr Stephenson. “It will completely automate the transaction of airtime between buyer and seller, delivering greater efficiencies and more effective advertising as a result of a new range of new investment models.

“We already trade 80 per cent of our digital inventory programmatically. I expect that over 50 per cent of our television inventory will be traded programmatically by June.”

Nine also confirmed that as part of the 9Galaxy offering it has invested in the creation of new audience forecasting technology to more accurately forecast future ratings delivery, giving greater assurances to advertisers.

“We have data scientists building new tools within the platform, so we can introduce new investment models that will allow us to guarantee the delivery of dynamic ratings bought using 9Galaxy,” Stephenson said.

“This means there is no risk and no real time inflation when you invest with Nine.”

Stephenson also announced that following the launch of 9Galaxy in February, Nine will be focused on building out the programmatic offering across all platforms before the end of 2017.
“We will be able to deliver audiences programmatically across linear television, online catch up, AVOD and live streaming across every device later in 2017. This will allow us to serve advertising directly to your customers based on their online behaviours, using our first-party data.”

The declaration came at the event where Nine confirmed its live streaming and on-demand viewing platform 9Now has hit a market-leading total of 2.2 million subscribers in just 10 months, and continues to see strong growth on the back of shows like Married at First Sight, Doctor Doctor and The Block.

Nine also confirmed it had gone live with a new Adobe Audience Manager data management platform (DMP) that would allow it to provide consumers with personalised content on platforms like 9Now and also enable advertisers to better target audiences.

The 9Galaxy announcement comes on the same day Nine announced a new major strategic agreement with Australia’s leading data exchange company, Data Republic, to gain access to key grocery-buying segments across its digital network.

“This is the future of transactional advertising,” Stephenson said. “Marketers expect, and here at Nine we are intent on delivering, a great advertising experience using world-class technology, in premium quality environments, all fully supported by rich data. It is this combination that will ensure we continue to achieve real results for our clients.”