How do you harness the full value of an Australian icon?
Nine
Over the past 8 years, Nine has been on an impressive growth trajectory driven by its own innovation and acquisitions of key media assets like Fairfax Media and Macquarie Radio, which has resulted in Australia’s largest media ecosystem – giving advertisers and partners unrivalled access to 20 million signed on users.
This expansion presented Nine with a new challenge: How to fully realise the potential of its collective businesses, whilst protecting the individual strength of each brand?
Partnering with Nine to take on the challenge, we focussed on defining a Group purpose that united all brands across their 5,000 employees, which provided galvanising context and sense of belonging. In order to effectively embed the purpose, we also co-created a compelling vision to inspire Nine’s future direction, coupled with company values that gave people clarity on how to show up and deliver in their every day.
Australia belongs here: A purpose co-created for every voice.
Nine's new purpose takes centre stage at its advertiser showcase
We designed a truly inclusive discovery process, starting by engaging the Executive Leadership Team to co-facilitate ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions with the Senior Leadership Team. We also ran a series of face-to-face workshops across the country with all levels of the workforce, and then took the conversation online: From interactive focus groups to a real-time microsite that shared the latest daily insights with all Nine employees to ensure we had transparency, inclusion and engagement throughout the process.
Engaging Nine employees nationally through facilitated workshops
By inducing task conflict, we ensured psychological safety along the journey to produce a sustainable and meaningful shared purpose: ‘Australia belongs here.’ A strategic platform to both unify and celebrate diversity. (‘News belongs here’, ‘Sport belongs here’ and ‘Your ‘brand belongs here’ are just some of its virtually limitless applications.) With Nine’s new North Star as the guide, we applied a similarly collaborative process to define a collective and inspiring vision, coupled with values to protect Nine’s unique culture for continued relevance and success in the future.
One unifying platform to strengthen all of Nine's individual brands
The ROI on relevance
Only recently made public to advertisers and partners, the Purpose now informs the foundation of Nine’s go-to-market offering, demonstrated in the latest ‘Upfront’ industry presentations.
“Nine’s proposition ‘Australia belongs here’ provides an emotive platform for the network to connect audiences with quality content in a data led way, across platforms, wherever and whenever.”
– Brittany Crowley, PHD Australia Group Investment Director.
“Nine’s nod to purpose and their new proposition “Australia Belongs Here” aligns closely to our Good Growth ambitions at Mindshare, and will resonate strongly with our clients.”
– Louise Bermingham, Mindshare Digital Director – Investment
“The theme throughout Nine’s 2023 presentation was ‘Australia belongs here’, cementing their local roots versus the global tech giants. This positioning allowed Nine to really bring the focus of the presentation to what they do best; content that engages Australians across broadcast, audio, news and digital.”
– Marelle Salib, National Head of Investment, OMD Australia