Creating a digital-first media business.
Nine grows digital data revenue by 265% and boosts outcomes for user engagement.
265%
increase in digital data revenue over four years
<24 hours
to activate audiences, reduced from 10 days
16%
higher open rates and a 204% increase in click-through rates from CDP-generated racing segments for Melbourne Cup
Increased
media spend from key advertisers by engaging in data collaboration to underpin targeting measurement
Featured products:
“Adobe is the partner of choice in supporting our continued data revenue growth.”
Stephanie Drabble
Director of Digital Product Commercialisation & Strategy, Nine
Modernising media through data and technology.
Nine is a dynamic, multi-platform business with assets across video, publishing and audio. It has embraced a digital future with well-established assets across all digital media forms – from broadcast video on demand (BVOD) and subscription video on demand with its homegrown platform, Stan, to digital publishing, digital audio and podcasts, and digital marketplaces.
Nine’s digital evolution was anchored in the belief that scalable data systems are essential to unlocking the full potential of its diverse content platforms — paving the way for a dynamic and privacy-first data strategy.
A great benefit of its diversification of digital assets is the ability to collect a vast array of data and create rich interest and intent profiles on consumers. Nine currently has 21 million authenticated users across all digital inventory forms. It also has nine key core content pillars across news/business and finance, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, luxury, property and automotive. These content pillars allow Nine to create incredibly deep user profiles on Australian consumers.
Vast distribution platforms across the web, apps and connected TV (CTV) means consumers increasingly engage with Nine throughout the day, whether commuting to work, reading a news site during their lunchbreak or watching 9Now at night. This ability to continuously build user profiles across all devices by collecting rich interest and intent data in real time was key to the foundational underpinning of its data commercialisation efforts.
Evolving from DMP to a privacy-centric CDP for future growth.
Nine was an existing, long-term user of Adobe’s data management platform (DMP). While the DMP served the business well, constraints were emerging. These included reliance on cookie/device destinations that were becoming redundant with industry changes and the fact that monetising offline attributes to act on new user signals was not occurring seamlessly.
Nine’s data commercialisation team recognised these constraints as a significant barrier to monetising data at speed and scale. To stay ahead, they began increasingly leveraging the Nine Data Lake in Google Cloud Platform along with customised integrations. However, the customised approach across advertising servers and supply-side platforms was prone to failure, prompting a broader reconsideration of Nine’s data infrastructure.
In 2022, Nine conducted an extensive review of enterprise CDP providers in the Australian market. After careful consideration, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform was chosen for two primary reasons: its market-leading data governance features and its data collaboration functionality, which enables advertisers to match audiences with Nine in a privacy-centric manner.
Nine appointed Senior Product Manager Rajesh Bisht to integrate Real-Time CDP into the company’s existing digital ecosystem. As a long-time Adobe customer, Nine trusted that the solution would both align with its technical infrastructure and unlock new services to help advertisers connect with audiences seamlessly across every channel.
The ability to restrict users and attribute access in the platform to user groups allows Nine to adopt a market-leading, privacy-centric competitive advantage with features that protect advertiser attributes. This feature also gives Nine’s data partners assurance that their audiences are being leveraged for data commercialisation efforts only, and not for marketing of Nine’s products, such as subscriptions.
Accelerating activation and unlocking new opportunities.
To monetise new user sign-up attributes within 24 hours and improve its data commercialisation efforts, Nine worked with Adobe to re-architect its data pipelines directly into Real-Time CDP. With the media company’s increasing focus on live sports — which drive spikes in new user engagement — this architectural shift enables Nine’s data commercialisation team to extract maximum commercial value from new users signing up to the 9Now service.
The team saw the convergence of data agility and audience engagement in live sports as a critical commercial lever. Their strategic vision helped guide the re-architecture initiative to ensure that data could be activated rapidly and at scale.
This speed to activation, when combined with the ability to match first-party audiences in a secure, neutral environment using Real-Time CDP, is unlocking new opportunities. For instance, retail advertisers can now target cart abandoners across the 9Now BVOD service by sharing audiences with Nine and serving ads on CTVs in the living room — providing retail clients with a premium media channel beyond traditional social media platforms.
Real-Time CDP is critical to Nine’s future data revenue growth trajectory, having helped more than triple digital data revenue over the past four years. Nine also measures the platform’s success through the percentage of digital media leveraging an audience segment. For BVOD, Nine is now seeing nearly two-thirds of digital media buys containing a Real-Time CDP supported segment.
Stephanie Drabble, Director of Digital Product Commercialisation & Strategy at Nine, is pleased with how the improvements to Nine’s data infrastructure are impacting the business. “Adobe is the partner of choice in supporting our continued data revenue growth,” she says. “Over the last four years, we have seen digital data revenue growth of 265%, supported by Adobe.”
“The insights we uncovered through Adobe Real-Time CDP allowed us to build high-performing audience segments with speed and precision.”
Rajesh Bisht
Senior Product Manager, Nine
Targeting racing fans with real-time insights.
Data commercialisation is not only the area benefiting from Real-Time CDP. Nine is also expanding its use of the platform to support wider marketing efforts. In 2024, Nine Network became the new broadcaster of the Melbourne Cup – the first time the network secured the rights to this prestigious event. A key challenge for Nine's marketing team was engaging audiences on 9Now, where prior data on horse racing viewership was absent.
To overcome this, the marketing team effectively utilised Real-Time CDP to identify relevant audience segments for the Melbourne Cup. Leveraging the platform as a unified customer database, they successfully reached individuals who demonstrated related affinities and behaviours across Nine's diverse brand portfolio.
Targets for email communications included: 1) Audience interested in horse racing, Melbourne Cup & related events; 2) 9Now users who have watched equestrian & core sport fans; and 3) Audience interested in fashion + light sport fans.
This targeted approach yielded impressive results. Notably, CDP-generated racing segments exhibited a significant uplift in engagement, boasting 16% higher open rates and a remarkable 204% increase in click-through rates compared to 9Now's broader sports segments. These figures clearly demonstrated the profound impact of delivering audience-specific content on email engagement, and the role of Real-Time CDP in utilising cross-brand affinities to build highly qualified engagement audiences.
“The insights we uncovered through Adobe Real-Time CDP allowed us to build high-performing audience segments with speed and precision,” says Bisht. “This campaign proved the value of a unified data platform in driving measurable engagement, even in areas where we previously had limited audience intelligence.”
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