Nine’s programmatic boss Jordan King on the future of Australian TV

Things are looking up for CTV down under.

A recent survey showed that half of Australia’s independent media agencies expect ad spend to increase in the coming financial year, with 70% predicting connected TV (CTV) and broadcast video on demand (BVOD) would see growth of at least 25%.

But for Jordan King, director of programmatic and digital sales at Australian broadcaster Nine, the news may not be so surprising.

King, a key figure in the Australian TV industry’s move to programmatic ad sales, has helped position Nine at the forefront of BVOD’s growth, from partnering with ad tech players to now overseeing the broadcaster’s programmatic ad sales for the upcoming Olympics.

“Advertisers’ willingness to go programmatic is a really strong vote [for] where we are as an industry here in Australia,” says King.

The fact that Australia’s largest broadcasters are now competing with the likes of Netflix and Prime Video for ad dollars is a welcome challenge for King.

“These VOD [video-on-demand] players are coming in and expanding that high-end, premium market, increasing the investment into open-web premium [content], and that’s really excellent,” says King. “That’s why we do what we do, because we think [BVOD] is the most valuable thing for brands.”

What’s a stream of people sleeping worth?

The belief in the importance of premium content carries over to King’s view of user-generated content (UGC).

“I’d be insincere if I said the only value in video was in BVOD. There’s value in UGC. But it’s about understanding what you’re buying the product for,” says King.

For advertisers looking for cheap reach, UGC may be just the ticket. But it comes with caveats. “You can try and convince yourself that it will be high-quality, premium UGC, but it’s not likely to be,” says King.

“There’s UGC that is professionally made, but for every one of those videos, there’s something filmed on an iPhone or streams of people sleeping,” says King. “If it was truly valuable, it would be priced accordingly.”

It’s about understanding that premium content comes at a premium. “Somebody has to put that show together — it has to be edited, it has to pass standards and guidelines to make it to television,” says King.

The Olympics, programmatically

Among premium content offerings, live sports have emerged as a key driver of audience engagement around the world, and things are no different in Australia.

“What we’ve seen is that live has become the greatest consumption channel. We talk to the fact that we have the rights to big sporting events in Australia,” says King, and that includes this year’s Olympics plus the Australian Open, a major tennis tournament.

As with NBCUniversal in the U.S., advertisers will also be able to buy Olympics ad inventory programmatically through Nine in Australia.

“We’ve given them the opportunity to activate programmatically if they want to, to buy in a total television fashion, utilizing all the power of BVOD and all the intelligence of digital,” says King.

That also means the ability for brands to infuse first-party data into their buys, a key consideration for advertisers grappling with signal loss on other channels due to cookies’ deprecation.

Positive wastage

Historically, TV ads in Australia have been bought through target audience rating points, which refer to the percentage of a target audience that is exposed to a program.

“You were buying one spot and getting many [audiences]. Now you’re buying a specific audience, but maybe not at the same time,” says King.

This shift in buying models has resulted in a change in advertisers’ mindsets. “For a very long time, the data conversation was somewhat immature, focused on how precise it could be. Effective brands now are buying a key interest base or a key demo, or they’re using suppression targeting on the right products,” says King.

Rather than trying to thread a needle every time, aim for positive wastage, adds King. “That seems like an oxymoron. But it’s really about targeting a certain demographic and other people find out about it. That’s how you build brands. People have to know that you exist.”

The future of Australian TV ad buying

Together with Australia’s other leading broadcasters, Nine is working on VOZ and VOZ Streaming, a product due this year that will standardize and aggregate linear TV and BVOD measurement. It’s an evolution from OzTAM TV ratings, which rely on a panel-based methodology.

“We’re bringing it into a programmatic space. We’re going to have a privacy-conscious identifier for each Australian, whether they’re watching through digital or traditional broadcast television, and bringing that strength of television into a total, digital market,” says King.

These innovations are possible in part because even though the Australian addressable market is relatively small — 26 million people, compared to the U.S.’s 333 million and the U.K.’s 67 million, for example — it is still the seventh biggest advertising market in the world.

“You can be a bit experimental here. It'’s big enough that you can have an opinion and get a conversation going, and you can have products that appeal to Australia that end up going global,” King says, pointing out that VOZ Streaming could easily translate to markets like Japan or the U.K., where traditional broadcasters are increasingly collaborating to achieve competitive scale against American streaming giants.

VOZ Streaming will seek to democratize the Australian video market, as it will allow brands to better compare performance between linear TV, CTV, and UGC. As it rolls out, King remains bullish.

“There’s nothing like TV to build brands — it’s done it for 60 years. BVOD is the natural evolution.”