Nine and Fairfax sales staff come together, with Pippa Leary and Matt Rowley promoted
Sales staff from Nine, and the company formerly known as Fairfax, will come together to offer marketers and brands “fully integrated marketing solutions” across television, video on demand, digital publishing and print.
The 500-plus sales staff will move into Nine offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, with the newly-merged business hoping the process is completed by early January.
When two become one: Nine and Fairfax
The sales arm of the business also has a new structure, with Pippa Leary, currently commercial director of digital sales, taking on the role of director of sales strategy and product commercialisation, where she will be responsible for commercial strategy and the monetisation of Nine’s digital and publishing assets.
In addition, Leary will continue to develop Nine’s programmatic sales solutions and take responsibility for the commercialisation of the combined group’s data assets.
Matt Rowley, who was until last week chief revenue officer of Fairfax, will now become director of sales for publishing at Nine. He will have revenue responsibility for all of Nine’s digital assets, as well as the major metro titles: The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.
Nine’s chief sales officer Michael Stephenson said today was an important milestone in the history of Australian media.
“The merger creates a media business for the future and the opportunity to provide a fully integrated sales offering across television, video on demand, digital publishing and print, all supported by Australia’s richest data proposition,” he said.
Stephenson: ‘Nine has the greatest media assets in the country’
“The move will significantly enhance our ability to offer more diverse audiences across new channels and create more powerful marketing solutions around our content that work from the top to the bottom of the marketing funnel – something which will be unique to Nine.”
Stephenson also sung the praises of his newly promoted leaders – Leary and Rowley.
He said there is “no one better in Australia” than Leary to help Nine create market-leading advertising solutions for advertisers, while Rowley is “the perfect person” to lead the publishing sales team at a time which presents both challenges and opportunities for the medium.
Lizzie Young will continue as Nine’s group content strategy director and will lead the fully integrated Powered team in the merged business.
“We now have the greatest media assets in the country, the best content, the best data product and the best technology,” Stephenson said. “But the most important asset we have are the people who work at Nine across all parts of our business to meet the evolving needs of our partners.”
Late last week, Nine revealed it had identified a further $15m in cost savings for the combined business, in addition to its initial $50m. 92 staff lost their jobs in a round of redundancies.
Leary is the ScoMo of this outfit. Much as Corbett was the Howard and Hywood/Hambly the Abbott/Credlin act.
Looks like Costello misses out again!
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Fairfax dead? How could they tell?
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