Lean operations and broad reach behind the Your Money joint venture
The merging of Nine’s broadcast reach and Sky News’ lean operations was the driving force behind the Your Money joint venture, executives close to its creation told a panel in Sydney.
Broadcasting on Nine’s free-to-air channel 95 and Foxtel’s 601, the venture was announced in June to replace Sky Business and launched at the beginning of October.
Your Money Live anchors Brooke Corte and Chris Kohler
Alexi Baker, Nine’s director of strategy and corporate development, and Kylie Merritt, CEO of the Australian Money Channel joint venture, discussed the genesis of the station during a University of Technology panel on the future of TV.
“It started out as a conversation between Hugh and Angelo – our then respective CEOs of the businesses — and it turned out they were both thinking of a similar channel that was this type of channel but with a different commercial model,” said Baker.
“So it wasn’t just about this many people watching it at this time times the CPM. It was about this time of audience being interested in this type of thing which is really attractive to brands and super funds and people like that.
“So we’d both been thinking quite similarly and they started talking and we realised they we’d be stronger doing things together and the combination we bought was we (Nine) had spectrum, because that meant we could reach 100% of the population rather than 30% in the pay-TV environment and we also had mass-market skills.
“When you think about Sky News it has this amazing production model where everyone is highly skilled, completes their stories from start to finish. They do their own writing, producing and editing and all these things.
“We thought the two coming together could be really strong advertiser proposition being Nine and News. And so we spent a year talking before actually launching the channel in three months.”
Merritt, who was appointed to head the joint venture at the time of its announcement, added the station also has an integrated digital and broadcast strategy as part of broadening its audience appeal: “When we first came up with the concept for the business, there was myself – my background is in TV – and our head of digital [David Ash].
“The two of us did all of this together and sat down and said how we wanted this to work. We refer to it as a kind of ‘content loop’.”
“We thought the two coming together could be really strong advertiser proposition being Nine and News”. And yet, unless I’m watching at the wrong times, you seem to have created a commercial-free commercial TV station. The only ads seem to be cross-promotions for other programmes.
User ID not verified.