The last of the paid streaming services to remain ad free, Stan, is taking on advertising from 2025 through its Sports offering. It comes as Nine builds out the muscle of its ad trading platform, Galaxy, to stretch across all of its TV solutions and platform in 2025 in a direct pitch against tech giants, Meta and Google.

As announced at the Nine Upfronts event in Sydney, Stan Sport will now be available for advertising in 2025. The media company confirmed there are no plans to introduce different advertising and non-advertising tiers for subscribers or adjust the price for consumers. But according to Nine Chief Sales Officer, Michael Stephenson, it will go to market with the lowest ad loads in Australia for streaming. Every other SVOD platform other than Stan already kicked off an ad offering and the sports players were among the first - Foxtel, Kayo, Optus Sport and so forth.

By doing so, the media giant said advertisers for the first time can plan and execute a single campaign across Nine’s entire total television platform, including the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport. The addition of advertising on Stan Sport also means advertisers can reach audiences across Nine’s live broadcast, live streaming and on-demand platforms.

Stan Sport offers a lineup of premium sporting events, including international and domestic rugby, tennis Grand Slams, UEFA Champions League, motorsport, and fight sports programming.

Stephenson said it's also expanding the number of 'tribes' on offer to advertisers in order to provide more choices when Stan Sport advertising debuts to target sports fans, but is starting with nine.

"We will start with a small number of partners as we build out our ad serving technology," Stephenson said. "The reason it's so critical is it's the final piece in our total TV puzzle. The combination of live broadcast, live streaming, on-demand advertising in an AVOD or free world, with the ability to target our SVOD consumers on Stan Sport, gives us a platform that doesn't have in a peer in Australia. All supported by our registered user base of 22 million users and development of ad tech through 9Galaxy gives us a significant competitive advantage."

Stephenson said the proposition is only in sport so far, but said Nine would "never say never" on introducing advertising to other parts of the Stan offering in future.

Alongside the new Stan Sport advertising proposition, Nine is bringing prime-time television inventory into the 9Galaxy platform from Friday 25 October, guaranteeing 100% campaign delivery with no shortfalls or make goods.

Nine is further developing out 9Galaxy+ as a next-generation platform that will enable advertisers to buy audiences across all of Nine’s platforms.

Stephenson noted every one of the recent Paris 2024 Olympics campaigns was delivered via 9Galaxy and that there was no shortfall or make goods on any campaign during that tournament. In comparison, based on the old-fashioned way of predicting via past viewership figures, he said there could often be +10% or -10% difference between what was sold and what was delivered in terms of campaign bookings.

“9Galaxy+ is our most significant technology project to date - a platform where every agency and client will have open, direct access to Nine’s inventory, trading systems, and pricing. We’re giving marketers unprecedented control over their campaigns, making it easier to plan, buy, and optimise across multiple channels,” continued Stephenson. BVOD is also already traded via 9Galaxy.

9Galaxy+ will integrate with Nine’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and leverage real-time audience insights via Nine’s Adobe CDP. The integration will allow for better-informed buying decisions, ensuring campaigns reach the right audience at the right time, in the right context, Stephenson said.

"Galaxy '2.0' is a total trading platform which will incorporate our CDP, it'll incorporate our CRM, it'll incorporate Nine Ad Manager, and importantly, it's going to give open access to every agency and every client to go in and access our inventory, buy their own media, see their own pricing, and create complete transparency in the in the supply chain," Stephenson said. "Today you can see all our TV, BVOD inventory and what will be on Stan Sport; you'll go on there and be able to transact. Today, you don't do that. Today, all of the transaction is done at our end, in conversation with a media buyer. Where we'll go to as a media buyer, will be able to go straight into our system and trade themselves just the way that you would with Meta or Google."

The early stages of Galaxy+ will come in 2025, with the MVP due second half of 2025. Nine will continue to build iteratively from there.

"The really important thing about doing this is that it allows you, in a fully automated way to have one CPM across all of Nine's total television inventory. That is really critical," Stephenson said. "We're starting from Friday with that converge training, so you will be able to do it, but it'll be slightly more manual than I would like. The ultimate goal is for that to be fully automated so there's one transaction across all of our platforms, one set of inventory, one set of data and one CPM.

"All of that is designed to deliver better business results. But increasingly, it's all designed to to position Nine as a platform alongside Meta and Google. Because the next iteration of Galaxy, once we built into total television, will be built to include total publishing, total audio. So we've got one transactional platform for our entire business.

"That's critical as we transition from being a content, data and technology business that delivers audiences in silos, to one that delivers audiences agnostically across our platforms to deliver better results for advertisers."