What you need to know:

• Nine has desiloed marketing teams, switching to centralised group model supporting key brand teams.
• Overhaul of unwieldy martech stack next.
• Major brand push likely within next few months though CMO Liana Dubois keeping cards close to chest.
• Dubois relishing “friendly competition" with Seven opposite number and former Optus CMO, Mel Hopkins.
• While Nine latest financials suggest financial prudence ahead, marketing budget should be safe, as CEO Mike Sneesby backs marketing, content and tech to win.

Known unknowns

“Stepping into the Group CMO role is very different to the hot pink machine that was Powered,” says Dubois. Despite being at the network for nigh on a decade, “what I’ve figured out in my first six months is there can still be a lot of things you don’t know”.

But Dubois says CEO Mike Sneesby has her back. “He’s a big believer in marketing-led growth and the power of content, technology and marketing to really propel a business like ours forward.”

First however, there’s been a structural job to do as Nine pulls together all of its mergers and acquisitions into something resembling order. Total media was the thrust of last year’s upfront, the first time that TV didn’t hog the limelight.

That reordering is also reflected in the group’s marketing set-up.

“Today we have what I'm going to call a hybrid structure that essentially sees vertical brand specialism alongside centralised group specialty.”

What that means in practice is that Nine has brand specialists for TV, specialists for radio, specialists for publishing etc., “but they work right alongside the group function, which has specialisms in things like audience insights or in-house media, or data,” says Dubois. “So there's a hybrid approach with vertical specialism and group specialism.”

That means the brand specialists keep close to their market, but have the group effectiveness and efficiency sitting behind them, per Dubois.

Size matters

Asked how many people make up Nine’s marketing function and for an idea of its budget, Dubois suggests there is perhaps something Freudian in the fact that “the boys always want to know how big something is.” Mi3 lets that one slide, then asks again what she’s packing.

“I would say for the scale of our outfit, we're actually an incredibly efficient team at a consolidated level, whether that's in the vertical specialist groups or in kind of a group function. We are, from a resource point of view, really quite efficient.”

Nine’s scale gives that lean team a “huge” media footprint of owned assets to play across – cross promoting its content and subscriptions with the network claiming 20 million audience IDs, some 80 per cent of every adult and child in Australia.

CMO vs. CMO

Asked about media mix learning – how the company is marrying its data and insight to channel optimisation – Dubois keeps her cards close to her chest, perhaps unsurprising given Australia’s cutthroat media environment. With former Optus CMO Mel Hopkins arriving at Seven just before Christmas, that competitive tension is unlikely to ease. Dubois, smilingly, says bring it on.

“I certainly do hope it gets interesting,” says Dubois. “I think over the next twelve to 24 months, all marketers will be tested yet again.

“I've always thought a little friendly competition can only be good for a category. So I'm really looking forward to it. Having worked with Mel in the past, she is a wonderful marketer and media is an incredible category.”

Either way, Dubois says she will be busy for the next 12-months with a major programme of works, with the network blowing Seven out of the water with a $300m bid to secure broadcast rights running through to the Brisbane-hosted 2032 games.

“That feels very exciting and very interesting to me – not just in terms of what we're doing over here in Nine as we prep for that huge global platform to land here on Australian shores – but in terms of what this whole industry is doing and is capable of,” says Dubois.

Transition mission

Locally and globally, linear TV faces strengthening structural headwinds that marketing cannot solve, with media buyers such as OMG CEO Peter Horgan suggesting after Nine's upfront that the group would likely make its smallest upfront commitment in years due to "so much movement of audience and performance". Dubois, however, says the future of television is bright, “but it will be total television. There will be a natural transition [of audiences from linear TV to non-linear] over time.”

The networks are trying to ensure that transition is orderly from a revenue perspective, while accelerating the growth of BVOD businesses to balance out linear erosion. Does that mean Nine’s marketing strategy will be less focused on getting big bursts for its linear tent pole shows over the year ahead? What changes can we expect to see in Nine’s go to market strategy? Dubois indicates Nine won’t tear up its legacy playbook entirely.

“It’s a total strategy. The core goal is to get as many people as is humanly possible consuming [our content],” she says.

“I think it would be quite knee jerk to have a look back at every prior plan in place and flip it on its head and do something completely in reverse. There are iterations that can be made, we will absolutely evolve as consumer trends evolve – and we'll see in the next few months kind of what that looks like,” adds Dubois. “2023 will be a year of evolution for Nine.”

Will she have the necessary marketing budget to drive that evolution, given Nine’s latest financials indicate cost blowouts?

“Nine believes in marketing-led growth. So in order to continue to attract the audiences that we do today or to grow them into the future, investment into things like marketing into content and into technology are important,” says Dubois, while adding a hedge. “Fiscal responsibility is clearly also important for everybody to manage through.”

Stack attack

Nine’s acquisitions and subsequent efforts to de-silo make tech consolidation the next big task. Two years ago the firm announced a deal with Adobe at its upfronts on audience matching and personalisation, before subsequently inking a similar deal with Salesforce. With 20 million IDs and Australia on the cusp of major privacy law change, with significant implications for consent, data trading and targeted marketing, there’s work ahead.

“It’s important that we use data transparently and responsibly,” says Dubois. “Use of first party data is clearly an important marketing technique across all of nine's assets. In terms of things like CX, martech and personalisation, I don’t mind saying these are things that are under review at a group level to see how we might be able to be more impactful and more effective in these spaces.”

She hints that some aspects may be a little underwhelming.

“For the extraordinary data footprint that we have and the capability to use it, I think there are still some things that even we could be a little better at today.”

Cue some vendors looking nervous – and the rest beating a path to Nine’s door.