Nine has moved to align its newly combined sales structure in order to create fully integrated marketing solutions for its partners across television, video on demand, digital publishing and print.
Under the new integrated sales structure Nine will co-locate all of the 500-plus sales staff from Nine and Fairfax into its Nine sales offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. This process is expected to be completed by early January.
“Today marks an important milestone in the history of Australian media,” said Michael Stephenson (pictured), Nine’s chief sales officer. “The merger creates a media business for the future and the opportunity to provide a fully integrated sales offering across television, video on demand, digital publishing and print, all supported by Australia’s richest data proposition.
“The move will significantly enhance our ability to offer more diverse audiences across new channels and create more powerful marketing solutions around our content that work from the top to the bottom of the marketing funnel – something which will be unique to Nine.”
Today, Nine also announced two sales promotions within the merged business.
Nine’s Pippa Leary is promoted to the newly created role of director – sales strategy and product commercialisation. Leary will be responsible for commercial strategy and the monetisation of Nine’s digital and publishing assets. In addition, she will continue to develop Nine’s programmatic sales solutions, and take responsibility for the commercialisation of the combined group’s unique data asset.
“We have a fantastic opportunity based on our suite of high-growth assets and our unique data proposition to create market-leading advertising solutions for our advertisers,” said Stephenson. “There no is no one better in Australia than Pippa Leary to enable us to do that.”
Nine also announced that Matt Rowley is appointed to the newly created role of director of sales – publishing. He will have revenue responsibility for all of Nine’s digital assets – nine.com.au, 9Honey, 9Now, smh.com.au, theage.com.au, afr.com.au, brisbanetimes.com.au and watoday.com.au – as well as the major metro titles: The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.
“Matt’s wealth of experience across both client and agency side, in Australia and abroad, together with his understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing Australian marketers makes him the perfect person to lead our publishing sales teams in-market,” Stephenson said.
Lizzie Young continues as Nine’s group content strategy director and will lead a fully integrated Powered team in the merged business from day one.
Powered will include a client strategy, insights and effectiveness team alongside content partnerships, client experience and commercial creative studio, all fully integrated and ready to create big ideas across the expanded suite of assets.
“Powered provides access for brands to Australia’s leading content creators across the broadest and most effective media platform in the country,” said Young. “Our ability to create big ideas based around the connection of brands to culture through this content is unrivalled, and we know these partnerships drive true business results.”
“Pippa and Matt will work alongside Richard Hunwick, director of sales – television and Warwick Sharp, director – sales operations to form the new Nine sales leadership team supported by Powered,” said Stephenson.
“We now have the greatest media assets in the country, the best content, the best data product and the best technology. But the most important asset we have are the people who work at Nine across all parts of our business to meet the evolving needs of our partners.
“Pippa, Matt, Lizzie, Rich and Warwick are all exceptional media professionals and great leaders and I can’t wait to begin the next part of our journey as a team.”