What you need to know: 

• Mamamia has landed its first upfronts pitch with new CEO Natalie Harvey at the helm – a departure from the independent media company's founder-led origins and a step Mia Freedman and Jason Lavigne reckon is the best way to "accelerate really, really quickly from a revenue perspective and from an audience perspective", per Harvey. 
• She was joined on stage by newly joined chief content officer Zara Curtis, and head of strategy Danni Wright, with Seven's Georgie Nichols joining the festivities from the audience ahead of her October start with the network.
• Content was at the forefront of the brand's 2025 slate, with the announcement of four new verticals, vodcasts, shoppable content, and ad packages on Mamamia's fitness app, Move.
• The publisher is also launching a new standalone brand targeted at Gen Z audiences – it's called Know. 
• The company is also doubling down on its first party data offering as it attempts to reposition as a tier one strategic partner for advertisers. Mamamia has partnered with research firm Today to develop The Daily Dial, a content planning tool that has made the insights the publisher uses to develop its own content available to clients and agencies for the first time. 
• With the team's collective foot firmly on the accelerator to take advantage of the "perfect storm" of audience fragmentation and advertising innovation, Harvey says that driving awareness of Mamamia's offering will be the next big task. 

Mamamia is signalling to the market that it's entering a new era of scale – and eyeing the big publisher ad dollars that come with it.

"While other publishers and creators are pulling back on investing in new content we're not – we're doubling down. We're going so hard, our podcasts are the modern day super brands with unrivalled influence, providing the perfect people to drive more engagement and brand trust," chief executive Natalie Harvey told a room full of marketers and media buyers as she closed out the media brand's Sydney upfronts pitch on Tuesday.

Harvey was the first in a clutch of big name hires joining the business this year, as Mamamia assembles what co-founder Mia Freedman described as it's "Avengers" squad. A four-stop 2025 upfronts tour means the squad is hitting the ground running. Brisbane and Sydney are now down, Perth and Melbourne still to go.

New content verticals, an entry into vodcasts (video podcasts), a new content planning tool and the launch of a standalone social-first brand for Gen Z audiences were the big ticket reveals for the year ahead. But behind the fuss of new announcements, the first big public outing of Mamamia’s new executive lineup might’ve been the best indication of where the business is headed.

Freedman and husband Jason Lavigne, who co-founded the business in 2009, have both stepped away from the front of the business, making room for Harvey to take the reins.

Initially hired as chief revenue officer at the end of 2023, the former Seven exec took the CEO remit from Lavigne in June. She was joined last month by former IAG marketer Zara Curtis, who is three weeks in as Mamamia’s chief content officer. Danni Wright, a 10-year stalwart of Dentsu media agency Carat, has also been in the mix as head of strategy since June, with Harvey’s Seven Network protégé Georgie Nichols due to step into the chief revenue gig next month.

Bringing in experienced talent with commercial and creative chops was critical to the business’ evolution beyond its founder-led origins, according to Harvey.

“The business has been around for 17 years, and it’s really led the way when it comes to podcasts, when it comes to social and how publishers show up in the social world, and from a website perspective, it’s gone from strength to strength.”

Per Harvey, media fragmentation and an evolving ad market have created the “perfect storm” of growth opportunity.  She reckons Mamamia is better positioned to drive the “massive strategic change” needed to harness those storm winds than its larger legacy counterparts, and with a scale that goes beyond other independent publishers – the media brand claims to reach seven a half million women every month.

“Jason and Mia have looked at how they can take the amazing foundation that's been built and be able to accelerate really, really quickly from a revenue perspective and from an audience perspective,” she said. “They've recognised that bringing in some new people with varied experience – because we all have really different experience – is the best way to do that.”

Freedman’s decision to step back as chief creative officer will “free her up to create content”, which Harvey reckons will be a boon for audience growth: “She’s got her finger on the cultural pulse better than any other media professional in Australia”.

“[Freedman is] still instrumental in driving the creative direction, and that's what she wants to do, versus having to run everything at the same time.”

Content rules

The publisher is – as Harvey puts it – going hard on content. Adding to the new audio erotica brand, Butter, that’s slated to launch in early 2025, and the arrival of Sarah Davidson’s Seize The Yay on the Mamamia podcast network this month, the business is expanding its touted ‘edu-tainment’ strategy into four new categories – work, birth, divorce and health.

They might be more gritty topics than the Mamamia brand is typically known for, but they’ll be in the same distinct tone, per Curtis.

“The main thing that we're leaning into is really knowing women and that trust. We have a really good connection with them, not only in the content we're currently making, but from the dark social [data] that we're pulling out, which is where we're getting our trend-based information to form the four new categories that are really playing into life stages and needs states.”

That data shows a 35 per cent increase in audience appetite for content that helps women to navigate their careers, so Mamamia will launch the ‘Biz’ brand in February. The Biz ecosystem will encompass written content, video, newsletter, social and audio, with former Bumble chief marketing officer turned entrepreneur Michelle Battersby as host of the namesake podcast.

Diary of Birth is a new content brand and podcast that aims to fill a gap for birth content that’s not “sensational or alarmist” per Curtis. On the divorce side, growing audience interest in divorce content has made way for the Once Upon a Divorce podcast, hosted by NYT best-selling author and recent divorcee, Sally Hepworth.

As for health, Curtis cites the need for more reliable health advice for women looking to cut through rampant misinformation spruiked by online gurus. For Mamamia, a virtual event series was the answer – particularly following the 14,000-attendee turnout to its Very Peri Summit in 2022. The 1 Million Women Project, as the new summit has been dubbed, will roll-out from March 2025 and will be paired with its own content ecosystem.

Vodcast, apps, shoppable

Alongside the new verticals, the media company is also set to make a proper play in the video space, expanding its existing podcast content into the vodcast format, starting with beauty and fashion titles, You Beauty and Nothing to Wear. With the new video format also comes shoppable content, which will launch across both You Beauty and Nothing to Wear from 2025.

In addition to the ad space and sponsorship ops across Mamamia’s core content channels, Harvey also flagged that fitness app Move will also be opening up to advertisers for the first time in the new year.

“You've got a really highly engaged audience and a lot of time on the platform. So think health insurance, clothing, shoes, or dating apps for those who don't want to get down to the local run club for some dating action.”

Rounding out the offer is the creation of Know, a new brand that will target the hard to research Gen Z audience with social-first content on TikTok and YouTube. Know will be a standalone brand with its own ecosystem separate from the Mamamia mothership, with content created for and by Gen Z, covering everything from "from elections to Chappell Roan to upside down pineapples".

It'll launch with twice daily content on a bespoke TikTok and YouTube channel, with a podcast and newsletter slated for phase two of the rollout, and an eventual expansion into events and even a discord channel. 

Data booster

Behind the content, Mamamia is also working to build out its first party data to bolster targeting capabilities across its programmatic and direct IO offerings – as well as off-network partnerships, which Harvey says the business is exploring further.

Ultimately, it’s the contextual buy that’s Mamamia’s bread and butter, Harvey told Mi3. But importantly, the context typically encompasses multiple touchpoints – “it's not just about being in a podcast, but it's also then being in that newsletter and hitting that audience in another way.”

Mamamia's touting has some big proof points – 88 per cent of its audience trust recommendations made by its podcast hosts and 77 per cent will go on to make a purchase – and it's working to make it easier for advertisers to tap into directly. In Q4 of 2025 Mamamia is anticipating a surge in it's addressable audience when it launches a new centralised app that will require users to log in.

Dark social blender

How that tracks will be interesting to watch, but for now the big data piece for Mamamia, joining the Mamamia DNA data and insights suite, is a new content planning tool called The Daily Dial.

The new product takes the same dark social insights and quantitative data the publisher uses to develop content across its platforms, overlays it with newly commissioned research from Today agency, and put it in the hands of Mamamia’s clients and agencies.

The tool will hit the market this month as part of the broader Mamamia DNA insights suite and will be leveraged internally by the publisher’s strategy team to workshop content strategies for clients – though there’s every chance it could evolve into a self-serve interface down the track.

More fluid than Roy Morgan?

After 15 years working in media agencies Wright said she’s been “blown away” with how Mamamia responds to briefs – anchoring content creation in “something of real-world currency to the audience”.

With the new tool in tow, she says the team has set out the four “content motivations or need states” of its audience – curiosity, calm, connection and confidence – and can identify the dominant need state associated with a client’s target audience and align its response accordingly.

"In major agencies you have Roy Morgan, which is very static, fixed data. I've never seen data that goes to the level that we've got now, where literally across the day and across the week we can see how those need states are flexing," said Wright. "We can give it to clients to use to inform their content strategies, and then we also apply it to our advertising strategy as well."

"What's really interesting about The Daily Dial, is that nothing like this exists currently with any other publisher. So brands can essentially take what we call our secret sauce and how we create content that brings audiences back to our platforms and engages with them, keeps them in our overall ecosystem," added Harvey.

Now all that's left is to convince the advertisers to move their dollars – a task that falls neatly in the hands of the new leadership team. 

“What we're trying to do is be positioned more as a tier one strategic partner, not just a digital publisher or a podcast network. And because we offer so many touch points into so many different platforms, plus we have the content creation capability with Squad, what we offer is quite unique. But, I think there's still a big job for us to do to drive awareness of that,” said Harvey.