Tag Archives: ninemsn

Mi9 relaunches brand-rich social TV app ‘Jump-in’ ahead of 2013 ratings season

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Nine’s social TV app, Jump-in, will let viewers of The Block All Stars take virtual tours of the houses renovated on the show and highlight products in the rooms, when it launches in full for tonight’s premiere of the show.

Mi9 today unveiled a suite of tailored brand and consumer opportunities to engage with television audiences via the app, which will operate across iPhone, iPad and Windows 8 devices.

As The Block unfolds viewers will be able to access 360-degree room tours and room reveals, news, catch-up episodes and additional video content, as well as enter competitions and vote for and comment on their favourite rooms.

“Jump-in goes beyond social interactivity and provides TV viewers with more,” Matt James, managing director of Mi9 Media, says. “People want bigger viewing experiences and to get inside their favourite shows, connecting with the stars and getting all those extra bits of information to give them one-up on their mates and other viewers.”

“This, in turn, will provide a strong platform for brands to connect with highly passionate, loyal and engaged TV fans to drive deeper consumer relationships across multiple devices.”

Sponsors of The Block – iSelect, iiNet and Suzuki – will participate in sponsored features, branded content and tap-and-touch panels to launch branded content.

iSelect has sponsored the ‘Viewer’s Choice Poll’ feature where viewers are invited to vote on their best room to win a chance to appear on the finale of the show and $25,000 off their mortgage.

iiNet is the sponsor behind the app’s 360 degree room tours, which feature hot spots highlighting products within each room and a daily quiz for the opportunity to win a technology related prize.

A ‘Drives the Block’ display panel, specially created for Suzuki, links through to video and content from the auto maker.

Jump-in will be available for all Nine’s top tier shows this year, along with selected Go and Gem programs. Five new shows are expected to be added to the app each week.

Consumer awareness and engagement with Jump-in will be driven by a range of marketing and promotional activities during 2013 which will deliver ‘bigger experiences’ to dedicated TV fans through the app. The Jump-in ‘button’ will appear regularly during Channel Nine broadcasts.

The first phase of Jump-in launched for iPad as a trial during the 2012 Olympics coverage on Nine.

 

Ninemsn deepens male focus with Mixed Martial Arts news site

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The rapidly growing popularity of combat sport Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in Australia has been given a boost and a targeted media platform, with the launch of a new site covering the sport on Ninemsn’s Wide World of Sports property.

The sport, best known through competition UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), is a full-contact combat sport which incorporates styles from a variety of martial arts disciplines. It has a strong following in Australia – the last local bout sold out in 30 minutes – and is seen as a key way of connecting with the hard-to-reach young male audience. Interestingly, it also enjoys a significant female following, accounting for a third of the audience at the last Australian fight.

“Mixed Martial Arts is one of the fastest growing sports in the world,” said director and driving force behind the site, Adam Ireland. “It’s gone mainstream – and there is a huge appetite amongst fans locally in this market.” Matches can be broadcast to more than a billion viewers worldwide.

Launched late last week, MMA Kanvas features original and UFC-produced content such as global news, exclusive video content, opinion, interviews and an “industry-first real-time social sharing hub”.

The hub will be powered by social media aggregator Stackla to connect Australian fans with MMA content and conversations from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instragram from across the world.

MMA Kanvas

“We wanted to tap into this passion for the sport by creating a site where fans can create and share content and engage with the community, as the action happens,” Ireland explains the emphasis on social.

Ireland, an ex-ninemsn employee, turned his passion for the sport into a commercial reality by pitching his idea for MMA Kanvas to ninemsn, which was then supported by the company’s entrepreneurship program.

“Adam’s passion combined with a great opportunity to tap into the growing popularity of the sport provided a strong business case for us,” Hal Crawford, ninemsn editor in chief, says.

The addition of mixed martial arts content with MMA Kanvas further widens ninemsn’s expansion into online properties skewed towards a predominantly young male audience.

Matches in the its leading league, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), are broadcast to an audience of 1 billion in over 130 countries, and it also attracts a strong female audience with one-third of attendees at the last local UFC bout female.

 

Mi9 partners Experian to fuse online and offline targeting

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Mi9 has partnered with marketing analytics firm Experian Marketing Services to enable advertisers to target Australians online using the same rich demographic and socio-economic profiles used in offline targeting.

The deal will see Mi9 fuse the online data is has collected from 17 million Microsoft IDs with Experian’s geo-demographic segmentation tool, Mosaic – an offline consumer marketing database containing records for 14 million individuals.

The result will enable advertisers to narrow their focus to specific online browsers based on household income, kids in house, life stages and 47 segments based over 200 offline data sets, including the Australian Census data.

CEO of Mi9 Mark Britt says the data match represents a milestone for marketers in being able to bring traditional intelligence to marketing online.

“From today, marketers can use their own intelligence and fuse that with Australia’s most comprehensive inventory of audience data and use that to reach consumers, online.”

The service will be also be able to match traditional cookie-based targeting metrics, such as purchase and browsing behaviour, to socio-economic status, age, gender and Experian’s other demographic profiling information.

Advertisers who are experienced with offline socio-economic segmentation can now bring that online, to extend the reach of their campaigns across digital, according to managing director of data and services for Mi9, Richard McLaren.

“This is us moving behind traditional cookie-based targeting to meaningful socio-economic, specifically targeted demographic data,” McLaren says.

“This is the next evolution of data-based marketing; taking large sets of offline intelligence and using that to effectively reach consumers, online.”

Experian’s award winning geo-demographic classification tool, Mosaic, is built in conjunction with their Australian partner Pacific Micromarketing.

New online ad unit frames entire pages with video

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Mi9 has launched a new ad unit which plays video in the masthead and side panels framing website content.

The ‘video background’ ad unit autoplays full screen in the background of the page, with the portions fitting in the masthead and side panels visible to the browser.

Launched in conjunction with Universal Music Australia (UMA) to promote the release of Lana Del Ray’s new album, the ad unit plays a 15 second clip and allows users to click-to-buy the album direct from iTunes.

Lama Del Rey

Managing director of Mi9 media, Matt James says the video background combines an imaginative use of the page real estate, with the power of video, to provide a compelling full-page brand message opportunity for advertisers.

Digital executive at MediaCom, Nicola Godsafe adds that the technique was chosen for the launch of Del Ray’s new album released today – Born To Die The Paradise Edition – to gain standout in a cluttered market place.

The campaign for UMA, live on Ninemsn site MusicFix, features content from the single ‘Ride’ and, in addition to allowing viewers to click through to buy, acts as a teaser for the full 10-minute video clip.

The ad unit is the first to use a full video background, according to Mi9.

 

Ninemsn’s shareable content tips: find the freaks

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Smoking toddlers, cannibalistic killers, dogs behaving like humans and the World of Warcraft rank among the most shareable content on ninemsn, a study conducted by Mi9 found.

Deviance, defined as stories that depict novel deviant behaviour, consistently features in the publisher’s most shared lists, editor in chief of ninemsn, Hal Crawford, revealed. “Freaks in general share very well,” Crawford writes on Mi9’s blog. “There’s no point denying it.”

However, the study also found that awe plays a strong counterpoint to deviance, with content depicting stories of inspiration that lift the spirits or speak to the aspirations of readers proving highly shareable. Stories of surprising scientific discoveries or heart-warming tales, such as the boy who made $11,000 selling lemonade for his father’s cancer operation, can awe people into sharing, Crawford says.

Around 15% of ninemsn’s traffic originates direct from Facebook, a percentage that is expected to grow as social networks mature and proliferate. To be highly shareable the content also needs to contain new information and evoke the emotions of the reader, in addition to playing on the two key levers of deviance and awe.

Aside from the content, the structure of a story is crucial to enticing sharing, with the ‘reverse narrative’ technique proving particularly successful. A reverse story generates surprise by playing on expectations before delivering the opposite to what is expected, such as the obese woman who wants to become fatter, the snake that gave a frog a ride in the Queensland floods and the bride arrested at her wedding, ninemsn found.

Animals doing unexpected or human-like things and cult interests, such as video game the World of Warcraft, also emerged as highly shareable. And it appears dog lovers are more sharing than cat lovers, with dogs proving the most shareable animal. “Go out and find a dog that worries about his finances, longs for something he will never have, or drives a car,” Crawford writes. “Then you will have sharing success.”

 

Olympics delivers 6 million video streams for ninemsn

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The London Olympic Games was the most successful sporting event ever in terms of online numbers, according to the event’s host of digital content in Australia, ninemsn, which recorded almost 50 million page impressions and six million video streams during the event.

Hosted on Channel Nine’s Wide World of Sports page, the content received an average of 400,000 unique browsers a day, two and half times greater than an average day for the site.

Managing director at ninemsn, Alex Parsons, says the partnership with Channel Nine allowed the site to be the sole provider of catch up online video content for Australia. Catch up content was one of the key ways Australians watched the Games, with 59% of video streams coming from catch up clips.

“With a team of four on the ground in London, we were able to deliver the most up-to-date, behind the scenes coverage on The Games’ site,” Parsons says. “In addition to the more traditional Olympics content, intimate knowledge of what the ninemsn audience enjoy reading and watching allowed our team to uncover some exclusive stories.”

Ninemsn ‘gamified’ its coverage by encouraging fans to compete against each other for cash prizes by earning points for watching videos, sharing links, commenting on stories, playing trivia and rating photos. The initiative resulted in 5500 user sign ups and generated over 127,500 social referrals.

The network’s TV companion iPad app – Jump-in – received an average of 6500 sessions per day. The app is now functioning as a second screen experience for the Today Show, A Current Affair, 11am News and 60 minutes.

Read: Marketing’s Top10 ways marketers are using the second screen.

 

Infographic: Online video snapshot

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‘Online video’, a format ‘traditionally’ entailing short rather than long online clips, is the subject of Marketing’s latest infographic investigation.

The point that emerges most strongly out of our visualisation of comScore’s data is the rapid increase in the amount of video being consumed and the increase in the amount of time spent watching as more long form content moves online. These findings point to a future where connected TVs merge what is considered online video today and traditional broadcast television.

But while we wait for that future to arrive, there are a number of other evolutions taking place in the consumption of video through PCs, mobile devices and apps on smart TVs.

The average online video watcher consumes 158 clips per month or 14.3 hours of video. Men dominate, accounting for two-thirds of time spend watching, the reason for which we won’t hazard a guess other than to point out that adult themed video is the seventh most watched category, reaching almost one in four Australians!

The news media’s shift towards video content is being led by ninemsn (aggregated under Microsoft’s banner) and Yahoo!7, who registered higher viewer numbers in April than Fairfax and News Ltd. In the battle of the big digital newspaper groups, News eclipsed Fairfax by 200,000 views but did not hold the audience per video for quite as long.

Data brought in from comScore’s US analysis shows that one-third of viewers regularly use the internet for TV show consumption, via services such as Hulu and Ooyala. This behaviour skews heavily towards younger audiences with almost one in two 18-34 year olds regularly watching long form TV content via the internet.

Click to view in full size.

Nine invites viewers to ‘Jump-in’ to social TV with new app

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Nine Entertainment Co is set to launch a social TV app to rival Seven’s Fango, as the campaign to make TV more social gathers steam.

The app, to be called ‘Jump-in’, will launch in mid-July to coincide with the Olympics and boast the potential for users to ‘check-in’ to a TV show or broadcast, similar to how social media users check-in to locations. While Spotify and social news reading apps have made it popular for consumers to broadcast their content consumption in social networks, the same behaviour is yet to take off for TV shows.

Nine will use the Olympics as a hook to encourage viewers to share their viewing behaviour, and as an entry into companion app behaviour. The app will also feature complementary content around the Olympics including interviews with the medalists, the full Olympics schedule, latest medal tally, results, news coverage and video highlights.

Group sales and marketing director, Peter Wiltshire, Nine Entertainment Co. says television audiences are showing huge enthusiasm to get directly involved in shows as they air. “We’re already integrating social media and interactive elements into our TV line-up, and hit shows such as The Voice and The Block, have demonstrated it enhances the fans’ TV experience,” Wiltshire says.

Jump-in will initially be available for iPad, and then rolled out in stages across iPhone, Android and Windows platforms and as a web app. ninemsn will offer a range of advertising opportunities to connect advertisers with Jump-in users.

 

Online news audience plateaus

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Few new readers have accessed online news in the past six months, according to Nielsen’s Online Ratings, as the category plateaus following a period of growth.

In March, 12.1 million Australians accessed media brands online but the overall category has seen “has seen little growth over the last six months”, according to Nielsen’s report.

Year-on-year growth has seen the category increase from 10.8 million readers in March 2011 to 12.1 million over the current period, with the audience skewing towards males over 35 year of age and households earning $75,000 or more per annum.

NineMSN/MSN remains the highest ranked media brand in terms of reach – and the third highest ranking website brand overall behind only Facebook and Google – commanding a unique audience of 10.7 million. Yahoo!7 was the only other media brand to rank in the top 10 brands, with a total of 8.0 million visitors in March.

However, in terms of engagement, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age dominated the statistics. Nielsen’s measure of stickiness, which incorporates site reach and number of visits and time on site per reader, places the two Fairfax mastheads ahead of other media brands.

In the overall rankings, the top nine ranked brands retained their ranking, with the only change coming from Google’s Blogger sites which moved from 11th position into tenth. Facebook continues to dominate time spent on site with 7 minutes and 55 seconds per session.

 

ninemsn launches Mi9 trade brand, details

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The ninemsn joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co has today revealed details of its new corporate and trade brand, Mi9, which spans publishing, advertising, data, gaming consoles, and an integrated production house.

Announced in November last year, the ‘M’ and the ’9′ in the brand name should obvious, but the ‘i’ stands for imagination and intelligence, says CEO Mark Britt.

“We’re extending our reach with our ad network, leading the market shift to programmatic trading, making a big bet on data and driving brand experiences onto new properties like Xbox. Mi9 is the articulation of our evolved digital offering,” says Britt.

The brand is broken up into three branches: Mi9 Media, Mi9 Data and Technology and Mi9 Ventures.

Todays announcement included that of the appointment of former Starcom UK managing director Matt James to the role of MD of Mi9 Media, which comprises all commercial functions:

  • Mi9 Advertising: selling Mi9 owned and operated premium sites, where context is important to advertisers,
  • Microsoft Media Network: represents Mi9’s third party advertising network and performance products,
  • Microsoft Advertising Exchange: launched in Australia last year, a real-time bidding marketplace that allows advertisers to bid on premium online inventory on an individual impression basis,
  • Mi9 Studios: previously NinePixels, Mi9’s creative design and development team, with an expanded offering focused on branded content and online video production, and
  • Mi9 Insights: focused on providing research into consumer behaviour online and translating that into actionable insights for advertisers.

The second arm of the brand, Mi9 Data and Technology, will be led by chief data and technology officer Richard McLaren, and has created the Mi9 Data Engine, which is intended to help marketers reach their audiences efficiently than ‘off-the-shelf’ segmentation.

Mi9 Ventures incorporates investments including Cudo, iSelect and Rate City.

The launch today comes less than a week after Britt called on Australian premium publishers to join the ‘private’ Microsoft Advertising Exchange and ally against the ‘Death Star’ that is Google’s ‘public’ DoubleClick ad exchange, open to advertisers and publishers of all shapes and sizes.

Ad Trading Summit Sydney: ninemsn calls on big Aussie publishers to ally against Google

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Deep within the Death Star itself, Mi9 CEO Mark Britt called on Australian publishers to join the Rebel Alliance against the Empire.

We were seated in Doltone House, Darling Island Wharf, which happens to be home to Google’s offices, and Google is the aforementioned Empire. We were there to learn, at an event organised by ExchangeWire, about automated trading in advertising and how it’s going to change the world of online advertising in this country, as it has done in the US and UK.

Britt used the analogy while announcing (or re-announcing) ninemsn’s advertising exchange under the mi9 trade umbrella brand. But this time the announcement included details of an interesting feature: ninemsn’s ad exchange will be open to all the nation’s premium publishers. Subtly visible on the slide projected at that moment were logos of Fairfax and news.com.au.

The positioning of Google on the dark side is due to the fact, according to Britt, the big G is “commoditising context” and doesn’t “believe in the value of brands.”

“Google will do very well at mopping up grandma’s knitting needles and fly fishing sites, but that’s not our vision,” he says, referring to the types of inventory available through Google’s DoubleClick ad exchange.

Mi9′s vision is to present to advertisers the value of premium content that Australia’s large publishers produce, and the accompanying premium ad space, by launching its private ad exchange, where not just anyone can sell inventory.

Further to that, ninemsn will be making every last pixel of its premium inventory available through the exchange. So far in Australia, publishers that have dabbled in automated trading (aka programmatic buying) of their online ad space have done so with ‘remnant’ inventory: leftover ad space their human salesforce hasn’t already sold.

Watch this space.

 

Beginning March, Marketing magazine is featuring a series of articles examining the implications of automated trading for Australian marketers, media agencies, and publishers. The March issue is on sale now and features an introduction to and demystification of this new world of data-driven, targetable advertising. Acronyms you will learn: RTB, DSP, SSP… and more!

Nielsen online ratings: YouTube falls, online retailers surge

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Nielsen has released its online ratings for November reporting a fall in the rankings for YouTube and significant uplift for online retailers in the lead up to Christmas, with Westfield experiencing the highest increase, up 115% in the past month.

The top 10 website rankings were relatively stable between October and November, apart from a small decline in visitation to YouTube which saw Microsoft leapfrog the video site into fourth place.

Small declines were seen for seven of the top 10 sites due to a smaller active universe in November, the report says. Slightly more men were active during the month, but their activity rates dropped significantly on the previous month to put their usage levels below that of females.

Google and Facebook continue to dominate the top 10, with one in every four minutes that Australians spent on the web in November coming on Facebook.

Top brands in November 2011 

In the media category, NineMSN led in terms of reach, however smh.com.au experienced higher visits per person and time per person.

While in retail, strong uplift in audience and activity has been noted across a number of retailers including Westfield (115% uplift between October and Novemeber), Big W (71%), Target (49%) and JB Hi Fi (39%). Based on previous years, another month on month uplift for online retail sites is expected in December.