Nine partners with Ooh Media on huge news play
Nine News is bringing news to the streets, announcing a multi-year partnership with out-of-home company Ooh Media that will see its news updates broadcast on digital billboards across the country.
Nine will provide more than 50 news updates each day, seven days a week, to 74 large format billboards across five capital cities, plus select regional centres, with content tailored to each market.
Helena O’Dowd, director of growth and retention at Nine, explains to Mumbrella that news distribution is evolving.
“We are forever scouring the market for different ways that we can be distributing our news,” she says. “Getting to a 6pm news bulletin is becoming increasingly tricky for most Australian households, so we are very actively making sure that our news product is being more broadly distributed at various times of the day.”
O’Dowd sees this increased distribution as both an opportunity for Nine, and as a duty of care in an era of distrust.
“We should be actively trying to take people away from getting their news from sources that are not fact-checked, that don’t really have a sense of responsibility about what people are reading and seeing. If we can be a force for good in this post-truth era that we’re in, then I think that’s a really good thing for Nine and for Nine News.”
O’Dowd tells Mumbrella the Nine News brand is “in incredibly good shape at the moment” and this out-of-home play is part of its move to “increase brand consideration.”
“We have been actively going for a more 18 to 39-year-old audience,” she says. “We’ve been on that journey for about 18 months. This is another brick in the wall in reaching people in that age bracket that have more sort of fragmented consumption habits.”
This is a younger generation that hasn’t necessarily lived through the ritual of the 6pm news bulletin. Digital billboards are an effective way to reach them and build trust within that demographic, O’Dowd says.
“It will become increasingly trickier to expect that people will be home for 6pm, so we have a bigger job to do now, which is broadening out the offering and making sure people are putting Nine News into their top consideration set.”
Bel Harper, chief product and marketing officer, at Ooh Media tells Mumbrella this partnership “brings trusted, real-time journalism to millions of Australians, wherever they are.”
Harper said Ooh Media is “creating a more dynamic out-of-home environment, that adds real value to people’s everyday journeys – and extends the value exchange for both audiences and our advertising partners.”
Ooh Media has similar news content deals with News Corp and Broadsheet, which will remain in place. News Corp’s content, taken from The Australian, news.com.au, and Vogue, will continue to run across Ooh Media’s street furniture, study, and office networks, while Broadsheet content also continuing to run in office spaces.
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Good luck arresting the decline in numbers of people watching free-to-air news.
I doubt most 18 year olds even know what Nine is or how to watch it.
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