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Nine promotes Lizzie Young to group content strategy director

Nine has promoted Lizzie Young  to the newly created role of group content strategy director, making her responsible for driving Nine’s approach to distribution and commercialisation of its content assets.

Young joined Nine in 2010 as director of content partnerships, digital product specialist sales and trade marketing before taking on her most recent role, director of innovation, partnerships and experience, in April last year.

Nine CEO, Hugh Marks, said the promotion was part of Nine’s efforts to adapt to changing audience needs.

“The facts are that Australians are consuming more television content than ever before. However, as audiences change the way they consume our content we too need to continue to innovate how we both create, and distribute, the unique premium Australian content that we invest more than $700 million every year on,” Marks said.

“Lizzie has played a key role at Nine over the past eight years, which has helped us bridge the gap between content and our commercial partners.

“She has the background, across both our content and sales divisions, to help drive not only greater effectiveness in our current business model, but also how we innovate the way we create, distribute and commercialise our content assets to adapt with changing audience behaviour,” he said.

“We must constantly adapt the business to address and commercialise the way people are consuming our content.

“Lizzie understands our content, the creators and the audience, as well as having a deep knowledge of our advertisers, and is more than equipped to build out what will be an important role in Nine’s future,” he added.

Commenting on her new role, Young told Mumbrella she would be working with the heads of Nine’s four verticals, Tom Malone, director of sport; Michael Healey, director of television; Darren Wick, director of news and current affairs; and Helen McCabe, head of Lifestyle; to ensure Nine was consistently engaging with audiences.

“I’ll be working with them to ensure the distribution of our content is the right mix or the ultimate mix, so it’s essentially getting the maximum number of Australian eyeballs to it,” she explained.

“There’s so many more ways we could be engaging with audiences across different platforms and equally, we need to be consistently doing that.”

“Whilst we’ve had a great start with Married at First Sight this year, for us it’s now about how do we do it each and every time with every single one of our pieces of content,” she said.

Young said her new role was important in a time when everyone was “chasing the ability to maximise their content” and build audiences.

“Everyone is chasing the ability to maximise their content and have the largest audience possible and provide an amazing customer experience for that audience. This is crucial in our ability to then provide an even deeper and broader platform for brands to work with us.”

“Ultimately, that commercialisation is what allows us to continue to re-invest in local Australian content and for us here at Nine that’s absolutely the more important thing that we do,” she added.

“We’ve been on an evolution for the last eighteen months now, since Hugh stepped into the CEO’s role and we’ve been consistently working towards how we do things differently and building out our company strategy and the first step of that was creating great content, then ensuring that we do distribute it broadly to engage with audiences and advertisers so this really fits into that middle pillar of distribute it broadly. We had a lot of work to do to get our content shorter for that first 18 months and we’ve proven our ability to do that.”

She said her new role was the next step in focusing on distributing content broadly, and engaging audiences and advertisers.

Commenting on future partnerships, Young said she was open to working with any platform which engaged audiences and also recognised the value of Nine’s “premium content”.

Young will report directly into Marks as part of the appointment.

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