Commercial impact

The politics and posturing that comes with TV ratings might just be sidelined for 2025 at least as the evidence comes in from Nine’s big gamble to take on everyone and anyone in media for supremacy in delivering commercial impact for advertisers, not audiences or audience numbers.

Early next year the first data from a $30m market/media mix modelling (MMM) experiment will start landing, comparing Nine and “Total TV” – that’s free-to-air broadcasting and its digital siblings in BVOD, live streaming, catch-up and short-form content – against the world, literally. But for the first time perhaps since commercial TV arrived in 1956, a broadcaster is not pitching TV ratings or audience measurement as their raison detre.  

Stephenson said last week Nine was transitioning from a content, data and technology business to one reporting business “outcome-based advertising”. The swing to performance or response-driven advertising over “brand investment” to capture demand was in large part driving revenues out of TV to Google and Meta, Stephenson said. He acknowledged the shift of media investment to a posse of social-tech juggernauts controlling up to 60 per cent of the global digital ad economy  was abetted in large part by the real time, digital business metrics they invented and piped into dashboards for marketing and commerce teams. Those data-rich teams could then feed-up the executive food chain with more reflective business trading conditions than a patchwork of proxy measures from media owners, research firms and advertising types around audience profile, brand equity measures and ad cost benchmarks.

That it's taken this long for a legacy media business to clock the role these home-spun platform metrics and dashboards have played in the revenue exodus from TV is a touch concerning - Nine is now  moving to close the open flank with new advertising-to-outcome analytics as standard reporting for any advertiser or campaign on Nine. Outside of the MMM trial, Nine has inked a deal with video metrics firm Adgile, which will provide via its platform advertiser-specific analytics linking the impact of their linear TV and digital video campaigns to search traffic, web visits and app downloads. More reporting metrics are slated for next year in which Nine's deal with the customer spending database of ANZ Bank's Data Co. could be expanded to purchasing or sales lift.     

Still, the ambition and apparent transparency in Nine's MMM program is what makes Stephenson either delusional, supremely confident – or simply resigned to a reality that nothing short of a career-breaking or reputation-shaking initiative will neutralise the market forces moving against the broadcaster content system in terrestrial and digital distribution.

Metrics and myths

Stephenson has been pounding the halls of blue chip marketers over the past six weeks for a direct feed on why they hold what he posits are these "wayward and running wild perceptions" about total TV audience declines and the impact TV advertising has on business results. He points to the trade press as one reason for the narrative on TV - and that marketers have bigger jobs than media and advertising so attention is scarce and details get buried.

The early pack of brands signed-up for Nine's MMM project include McDonalds, Qantas, Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, Lion, Colgate, Arnotts, Westpac, Kia, NRMA, Optus, Koala and Aussie.

"The two points that I've made consistently in the last five or six weeks to many, many CMOs are that total television audiences are in growth – so the combination of live broadcast, live streaming and on demand. The second is you can reach 9 per cent more people today on a total television basis than you could have done in live broadcast TV 10 years ago. But in the end television needs to be better at proving a direct line between your investment and result, and inherently, we all believe that it does. So let's prove it, and let's do it together, because there isn't a single marketer in Australia that won't invest more into total television if it delivers better results. We've just got to prove that it does. And that's the whole MMM concept.”    

It is true a stadium full of advertising effectiveness studies conducted globally over two decades typically still nod to TV’s dominance on commercial impacts – with or without flighting other channels. But a $600m revenue exodus in just two years needed a bigger catalyst for change.

As an aside, Nine and the Australian media sector at large need to back the independence of MMM models – Google and Meta both have their open-sourced econometrics products in market - Meridian and Robyn respectively - which are deeply subsidised to ensure penetration. The platforms, say some observers, have successfully controlled the media measurement narrative for a decade – along with the associated business data they engineer.  Google and Meta want the same on MMM's as their control of media channel and budget allocation surges. There are early signs model transparency will be the order of the day for marketing teams - Google, for instance, is incentivising holding companies, agencies and consulting firms to land Meridian with clients. And as noble a business as it is, it's difficult to see why the digital ad giant would actively promote a product that recommends against its own properties like YouTube and Search.

Meta earlier this year, ironically, released a commissioned whitepaper from Analytics Partners - one of the firms in Nine's MMM group with Mutinex, Omnicom's Annelect, GroupM, IPG and Publicis - comparing its MMM analysis to typical digital attribution reporting. Analytics Partners' MMM, with a broader set of business data to crunch, showed paid search's budget allocation was for most significantly inflated.

Measurement monopolists

"There’s no doubt Google and Meta have a measurement monopoly,” said one media industry executive who did not want to be named. “They’re trying to extend that monopoly into MMM and ensure brands and vendors are aligned to them. It’s not surprising Nine has picked a range of MMM vendors to try to break that measurement deadlock.”  

It’s a valid point but the primary driver for Nine and Stephenson is probably not that long-term – it’s how the market can bust its own deadlock to trade on business outcomes over audience numbers and reach. And then Nine has to prove it can carve up it competitors on impact scores.

Stephenson says ultimately he’ll get between 20 and 30 brands signed-on to the program, testing up to 30 hypotheses – those are still to be finalised but the line-up, based on what the market and marketers in the trial have so far suggested could include: 

• Audience each and frequency – test how different audience reach and frequency strategies impact campaign outcomes. This includes understanding whether broader reach or higher frequency leads to better results.
• Cross-platform effectiveness – evaluate the effectiveness of advertising across different platforms, including live broadcast, live streaming, and on-demand content.
• Data-driven targeting – assess the impact of using data to target specific audience segments, including the effectiveness of Nine's 108 audience segments or “tribes”.
• Creative optimisation – analyse how different creative elements, such as ad length, format, and messaging, influence viewer engagement and conversion.
• Real-time targeting – examine the benefits or not of real-time targeting using Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to enhance advertising effectiveness.
• Impact of different planning “perimeters" – testing how different planning approaches affect campaign outcomes.
• Role of data in BVOD – this hypothesis would examine the impact of data on Broadcast Video On Demand advertising effectiveness.
• Optimal frequency for BVOD – this looks at determining the optimal frequency for BVOD ads to maximise impact without causing viewer fatigue.

Stephenson is pragmatic enough to know that not all the data bursting out of these MMM projects will be good for his or Nine's agenda but he is convinced the results will ultimately swing in TV’s favour. Confidence? He’s banking on it. 

Disproportionate credit

'What we've all known for a long time is intuitively television drives amazing sales results, but there's never been a direct line between your television investment and your outcome,” he told Mi3. “And so the emergence of MMM models gives us a tool now to more accurately understand that direct line. The platforms have been given disproportionate credit for their role in the marketing ecosystem, and one of the reasons is they have had reporting tools that actually give you some form of understanding of the impact that your advertising had on their platform."

Now, he says Nine will too.

"This is the opportunity for television with third party, independently verified partners to give advertisers, marketers what they've always had from the platforms. Now you're going to get it from total television and what I'm confident about is it'll show and highlight the role that total television actually plays in the marketing ecosystem and how it helps to drive the results that you're seeing on search and social that they've been reporting forever," he added.

"And so the emergence of MMMs gives us a tool now to more accurately understand that direct line. By the time we get back from Christmas holidays and we're into the new year, I should have a number of themes already starting to flow through."

There's $300m or more riding on it in 2025, the fortunes of TV and maybe even Michael Stephenson.