This year’s Nine Upfronts gave brands and media buyers a decidedly different narrative to engage in, and it wasn’t just down to the high-production, immersive format of its showcase.

Nine put forward a confident content slate that exuded what the locally owned and operated media company does best: Breadth of Australian programming, talent and connection across sports, entertainment, drama, news and lifestyle. But secondly, it revealed the engine fuelling how it’s taking all this to market in 2027 has been strategically recharged.

As Nine’s chief executive officer, Matt Stanton, and chief sales officer, Matt James, told Mi3 in a podcast recorded in the immediate afterglow of the Upfronts event, Nine has become a very different media company in the last 12 months. Having tackled the heavy lifting on portfolio mix and strategy, it’s putting forward a refreshingly firm, unified proposition that covers broadcast to streaming, publishing and digital-out-of-home.

Propelled by its most integrated owned and operated media offering to date, buoyed by the $850m acquisition of digital out-of-home player QMS, Nine is pitching a ‘sofa to street’ cross-platform play for advertisers, supported by a single media planning and buying platform, Nine Neo. This go-to-market strategy is designed to bring cohesion to how brands trade and measure the effectiveness of what Nine has to offer. And it’s backed by significant investment into unifying audience targeting and insights extending from screens into physical locations and commerce.

The upshot: Nine is pitching itself as a strong contender against big tech and the global streaming platforms, and the only Australian-owned, fully integrated media network that can connect brands to audiences across their entire day.

It’s a crucial time to shore up this full-funnel, multi-channel proposition in market. Hundreds of millions of ad dollars have exited the linear and broadcast industry over recent years, reallocated to digital platforms and walled gardens. There’s active debate right now around whether it’s the responsibility of government, media buyers or brands to proactively back Australia’s domestic media industry. Many agree supporting local-first content and journalism is crucial to societal cohesion and cultural connection.

But ultimately, media companies have to demonstrate they have the audiences, scale and solid returns on investment to win ad dollars. That’s what Nine is backing itself to provide. Stanton pointed to the power of the State of Origin, Olympics and Married at First Sight in delivering cultural moments as his first proof point.

“It's very important to have scale and diversity in this marketplace,” Stanton continued. “If you are a single platform – and it doesn't matter how big you are – it’s very difficult to compete with some of the big global tech players because obviously, they have the investment of a whole global team versus a local team like ours. So it's really important to get these three business units – streaming and broadcast, publishing, and out-of-home – working closely together, but also in their own right as well. They have to stand on their own two feet is the way I think about it, but then they've also got to collaborate when they need to collaborate … That's the only way we are actually going to be able to compete with the big global players.

“That’s very clear to me, and the portfolio changes we’ve talked about are really significant. Now, it’s about execution, and using these three big assets at the right time, either individually or cooperatively.”

Then there’s strength in fully owning and operating such assets. Nine has a “powerful” ability to unify and coordinate these all the way from content to data, technology, audience and cultural moment, said James. “It’s a big full-funnel proposition that enables us to start from brand to covering the breadth between awareness and transaction,” he said.

“This is also only going to work if you fundamentally have your strategic destiny in your own hands. This requires unified content delivery systems. It requires unified IDs around our 22 million audience base. And it needs all of the investments we are making in the technology to develop this the right way.

“Everything we’re developing comes with a long-term perspective, which I think is another one of our fundamental differences. I appreciate there are lots of partnerships going on in that [out-of-home] marketplace, but you can't make these kinds of investments and unify that in the way we're unifying our data, and even our content platforms across 9Now and Stan.”

James additionally points to the heft of Nine’s assets today as evidence it can deliver this to advertisers. “They really do reach most of Australians, and anything we now do, we can develop from a long-term perspective, particularly as we embed outcomes-based reporting,” he said.

Nine’s commitment to longevity extends to the content it’s investing in. Its recent NRL deal to 2034, along with a freshly minted seven-year EPL deal, are examples. Nine also has rights to the Olympics through to Brisbane 2032. Demand for these marquee events has never been bigger, James added.

“We have properties such as The Block, MAFS [Married at First Sight], and news, which clearly anchors on consistency,” Stanton said. “Advertisers know what they are getting; it’s very consistent, trusted and at the heart of Australian cultural moments.”

Under Nine’s cross-platform strategy, many loved content offerings are also now showing up across its broader asset base.

“If you just put one bit of content on one bit of platform, it will not grow,” Stanton commented. “We now have the EPL and the rights on the streaming side on Stan, but we can put it onto Nine and 9Now as well. We can push it through the publishing business and outdoor as well … From an advertising point of view, when you can do that, it’s very powerful.”