Nine’s main message at this year’s Upfront event is that it wants to be accountable to business outcomes, above and beyond the audiences it delivers. Nine’s chief sales officer Michael Stephenson sat down with B&T to explain how Nine plans to shift the dial on how success is measured across the Nine Network, and why this transition matters.
In the past two years, more than $600 million of advertising on total television has been siphoned out of ‘brand awareness king’, and poured into lower funnel performance based channels.
Part of this is due to a perception that linear TV audiences are shrinking and eyeballs are going to other video platforms, including the likes of YouTube, TikTok, Netflix and other streamers.
Legacy broadcast TV companies, such as Nine, have struggled to contain the rot because they have lacked the sophisticated measurement infrastructure to prove TV is effective, irrespective of the legions of research that prove otherwise.
Nine wants to change this perception with new data and analytics partnerships that help brands link Nine’s advertising activity to business outcomes, a huge investment in a CDP to turbocharge Nine’s proposition and advances in the way buyers can acquire Nine’s inventory.
Nine’s chief sales officer Michael Stephenson sat down with B&T to explain why this matters.
“The challenge that we’ve seen in the last couple of years is that advertisers have accelerated towards bottom of the funnel advertising where there was a seemingly a more direct line of sight to an outcome, whereas what we’re seeing through all of the market mix models is is that television continues to deliver an incredibly strong ROI,” he said.
“When you look at ROI, you must look at it in combination with the total sales volume that it delivers. And when you look at television through that lens, it is the high performance athlete of the advertising world.”
Various Nine announcements (see below) ultimately add up showing the market that Nine is a full funnel proposition and can help businesses not only top up the funnel, but also convert.
“Total Television by design is a combination of live streaming and on demand, broadcast and digital. Therefore it is a full funnel proposition,” Stephenson said.
“We’ve got a job to do, as the economy starts to recover, to encourage brands to invest in demand generation and top of the funnel advertising to continue to deliver business growth for their own company.”
The battle to change perceptions won’t be easy. The likes of YouTube, Google search and Meta have spent years and vast amounts of resources swaying marketers to invest their budgets into digital media platforms that have very sophisticated and granular ways of measuring success compared to legacy media businesses like Nine.
“What I think is very true right now is that the platforms, as they measure their own results and outcomes, have held a position in their advertising and marketing ecosystem that’s not relevant to the role that they play. And I think the pendulum needs to swing back to a more normalised place. Now, is there a role for search and social? Of course, is there a role for affiliate marketing? Of course. But it should be done in combination, and not at the expense of, the heavyweight champion of advertising, which is total television.”
So how does Nine intend to do this?
Lighting a fire
Nine is sharpening up its data and tech to help advertisers better target and prove their ROI (see announcements below). Closing the loop from top of the funnel awareness to conversion is the key, and Nine is throwing in $30 million worth of advertising inventory for independent partners to test the efficacy of TV television.
Analytic Partners, Mutinex, Annalect, GroupM, IPG Mediabrands and Publicis have been brought in to provoke (or disprove) 30 hypothesis about ROI and sales volume generated from campaigns.
Brands that have signed up to the ‘marketing mix modelling project’ include KIA, McDonald’s, Telstra, Westpac, Lion, Fiji Airways, Colgate, Koala and Trip A Deal.
Campaigns will be tested across 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
“I’m confident because I see our own internal data, but the challenge, of course, is that I want this data to be independent, third party, verified by people outside of our own walled garden. And that’s what will differentiate us from the platforms,” Stephenson told B&T.
“It’ll be clients using their preferred provider of market mix modelling with their own data, their own advertising data, their own sales data, seeing the results that each platform delivers, and being able to optimise using the levers towards certain channels if they’re proving to deliver a better return on investment.”
One other development that is in its infancy is that Nine is going to upgrade its trading platform Galaxy. It will bring prime time linear TV inventory into Galaxy, for the first time, so that buyers can trade using the platform rather than going direct.
Currently, about 70 per cent of Nine’s linear TV inventory is committed to in large upfront media deals with the media buying holding companies.
Stephenson said that this will likely shift to a 60-40 split, with more available in the casual market.
“I can see that adjusting and that allows us to take advantage of opportunities that are in the market. And I’m quite excited by that. Open access to the platform increases transparency and makes it easier to trade. This is important because I want Nine to be seen as a platform right alongside meta and Google, not as a media company that has different media assets.”
“I think you get to a point at the end game where you’ve got one platform that has all of our total television, audio and publishing assets included with one data asset and one trading methodology that allows you to buy audiences wherever they are in our world.
“In today’s world you buy a television audience, an audience on publishing an audience on radio, and then other things like search, social, out of home and other stuff. The more that we can make it easy to transact one audience across all of those assets, the better it will be for our customers.”
New effectiveness bells & whistles
Nine has secured partnerships with Adgile and DataCo. Adgile will independently measure the effectiveness and attribution of every campaign.
This collaboration will provide real-time insights into web traffic, app engagement, and share of search, ensuring that advertisers receive comprehensive reporting at the campaign level. By harnessing these insights, Nine said it aims to deliver superior business results for all advertising partners.
“We believe that transparency and measurement are critical in today’s advertising landscape,” said Nick Young, Nine’s commercial director – digital (pictured below). “With Adgile’s expertise, we can offer our clients the tools they need to understand the real impact of their campaigns, whether they are investing $20,000 or $20 million.”
In addition to the partnership with Adgile, Nine is also partnering with DataCo to integrate rich consumer profiles based on aggregated category spend via ANZ data. DataCo securely connects this valuable data with Nine’s own, to provide advertisers with sophisticated insights into sales uplift and category spend outcomes, directly linking them to exposed audiences to measure advertising impact.
Nine will also enhance its attribution reporting to ensure advertisers have the most accurate and actionable insights at their fingertips. Nine will enhance its reporting capabilities by incorporating web traffic and search data insights into every report.
This initiative will empower advertisers with multiple data points and granular insights, enabling a thorough understanding of the effectiveness of their TV advertising efforts.
In the coming months, Nine will launch automated campaign reports with self-serve dashboards for every 9Now campaign. These reports will feature in-target delivery and reach metrics, 9Tribes analytics, and footfall traffic reports powered by Near.
New Data Stack & More Powerful Tribes
Nine has rebuilt its data stack to deliver “one of the most advanced” audience data platforms for advertisers in Australia. Nine will also expand 9Tribes to include more new intender audiences to ensure brands can reach hard-to-find consumers.
The new platform gives advertisers access to comprehensive, real-time insights, targeting and sales-based measurement built on Nine’s unique first party audiences to ensure return on investment for advertisers is unparalleled to deliver better business results.
This single view is made possible by Nine’s new real-time Customer Data Platform, implemented in partnership with Adobe, which is now live. The CDP brings together data from Nine’s 22 million logged in users across the entire Nine suite of brands. It collects their demographic, content consumption and behavioural information. It also brings in data from selected partners like flybuys and Equifax to create rich, detailed, real-time profiles of audience members.
Advertisers will be able to target recent buyers that have purchased a rival brand utilising insights that cover state, region or postcode. Utilising Adobe’s predictive artificial intelligence to model buying intention, billions of data points are being used to create the new 9Tribes intender audiences.
In 2025, Nine will also be expanding the forecasting in 9Predict – which uses AI to predict audience availability in broadcast – to now include 9Now inventory, ensuring brands can connect with 9Now’s fast-growing viewership.
Through the CDP – and data from partners Equifax, Flybuys and Azira – Nine has integrated more than 40 data sources from across Nine’s assets, collecting real-time data points every month about who Nine’s audiences are, what they watch, read and listen.
To super-charge these insights, Nine is also announcing a partnership with DataCo that allows Nine to create rich consumer profiles based on category spend from cardholders.
“Nine’s tech stack and data gives a market-leading return on investment for brands and advertisers. The combination of Nine’s ability to identify audiences and bring that together with these rich behavioural and content consumption signals allows us to create the most comprehensive, single view of the consumer in the market,” Nine’s chief data officer Suzie Cardwell (pictured below) said.
“For our advertisers, our ability to understand what our audiences are interested in ensures we identify audiences most interested in their product. This allows us to identify the audiences most interested in their product and allows for a seamless and accurate view of who they are.”
‘Next Gen’ trading on 9Galaxy+
Nine today announces that 9Galaxy+ is in the early stages of development, a next-generation platform that promises to revolutionise the way advertisers manage cross-platform campaigns. It will be the first fully integrated trading platform that enables advertisers to buy audiences across all of Nine’s platforms – live broadcast, live streaming, on-demand and SVOD, and ultimately Nine’s Total Publishing and Total Audio assets through a single, unified interface.
Built to streamline operations, 9Galaxy+ will integrate directly with Nine’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and will leverage real-time audience insights via Nine’s Adobe CDP. This advanced integration will allow for better-informed buying decisions, ensuring that every campaign is optimised to reach the right audience at the right time, in the right context.
“The introduction of Stan Sport into Nine’s Total Television platform allows brands to reach even more Aussies and creates new opportunities for premium integration,” said Stephenson.
“9Galaxy+ is our most significant technology project to date – a platform where every agency and client will have open, direct access to Nine’s inventory, trading systems, and pricing. We’re giving marketers unprecedented control over their campaigns, making it easier to plan, buy, and optimise across multiple channels.”
“We reach consumers at scale, we provide premium content, a unique data proposition and we have world class technology. It’s never been more important to invest in full funnel marketing solutions and Nine is the perfect partner to help deliver better business results.”
