Nine’s upfront display was grand, and might ruffle some feathers: media buyers
Nine announced a range of Olympics ad offerings and adtech innovations at its upfront on Wednesday night. Now media buyers share what they thought of the pitch.
This is part of Mumbrella’s coverage of the 2024 upfront season. Click here to see other articles in the series.
The Olympics: A plethora of opportunities
Max Broer, national strategy director at M&C Saatchi’s media agency Bohemia, said one thing Nine has been lacking for a while now is a case study of how advertisers can utilise all of its scattered assets around one property.
Nine’s CEO, Mike Sneesby, in a Welcome to Country ceremony
And about halfway into its presentation at the upfront, Broer said he realised Nine was trying to create space for that exact opportunity with the Olympics offering.
“They did a very good job of pitching the vision for how they see all that coming to life. Which is essentially putting in Olympics broadcasts through every single channel they have 24/7,” he told Mumbrella.
The opportunity here, Broer said, is opening the tournament up to advertisers in adjacent categories.
“They talked to things like having sort of a whole period of French fashion and French food coming through and things like that. That made me start to think about how you get clients in, for example, the travel category across.”
The challenge, though, also lies in how these multiple streams of content can work with each other.
“Previously working with Nine, the challenge has been trying to get so many different properties within their organisation to come together around a solution for smaller budget campaigns.
“So while they might open up tiers, the question is whether the Olympics sponsorship package of this breadth is only open to enormous clients like McDonald’s, or is it going to work for smaller clients.”
Adtech innovation: Save the best for last
While the upfront pitch was clearly spearheaded by the Olympics, Brittany Crowley, PHD Sydney’s co-head of investment, said Nine clearly saved the best for last, which were some quality developments in the digital, data and tech space.
“Some big shifts in data accessibility and segmentation will enable advertisers to be smarter, more targeted and measured across Nine’s scalable ecosystem.
“The announcement of a streaming segment to target Stan subscribers across Nine’s wider portfolio was well received but still no movement on a commercial ad offering.”
Its effort to engage with small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) via the Nine Ad Manager also didn’t go unnoticed. “Albeit a clear play for Facebook and Google dollar,” said Atomic 212’s national head of trading Lorraine Woods, “the offering creates opportunities for new revenue for Nine.”
“Keeping a user-friendly approach, powered by AI and removing barriers such as creative production fees will mean a good opportunity for small businesses to reach mass audiences in ways they have previously not been able to.”
“With AI-generated slideshow ads being broadcast into living rooms, I am not sure they will quite build an emotional connection,” Chris Parker, CEO at Awaken said. “But hopefully, it will help local small businesses stay top-of-mind.”
RTLX: Will ruffle some feathers in the market
One announcement that undeniably caught everyone’s attention was the RTLX partnership program. However, most buyers agreed that the offering is very light on details at the moment.
“The RTLX product is a smart one, delivering a full-funnel solution for brands within one of the largest and fastest growing market categories … This will no doubt ruffle some feathers in the market,” said Crowley.
Broer, meanwhile, said he was left wanting more information after the announcement but felt like he hadn’t seen enough of RTLX to actually understand what Nine was planning to do.
“Is it just a superpowered affiliates program, which people like News [Corp Australia] have been doing for a while, or it is sort of building shoppable ads into their platform? I wasn’t too sure exactly what it was, with all those new things wrapped into a new product.”
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Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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topics
2024 upfront
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Awaken
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Brittany Crowley
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Max Broer
PHD Sydney
RTLX
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