Keeping costs down top priority as Nine’s new TV boss rings in changes

3 months ago 22

Nine Entertainment’s new broadcast and streaming boss says wage costs across the media giant’s biggest division, including that of on-air talent, will be closely watched as she moves to squeeze more revenue out of the hit shows on its roster.

Laing, who joined Nine from Foxtel earlier this year, told this masthead that the business needs to keep a lid on its costs as it puts Nine Network, Stan and 9Now under one roof.

Nine’s managing director of streaming and broadcast, Amanda Laing, has begun to make changes.

“We are looking at the remuneration across the entire business, from, yes, people on-air to people involved in production, to people in IT, to engineers, technology, all of these things to make sure we’ve got the right cost base and the right investment in the right areas.”

Laing presided over her first cost-saving measure last week, with Nine saying it was looking to cut 50 jobs from its newly created broadcast and streaming division, with some big names from its different nightly news operations among the casualties.

“The last week has probably demonstrated that we are looking at all parts of the business and cutting our cloth accordingly,” Laing said.

“It’s been a really difficult week and a really challenging week. Nobody wants to say goodbye to friends and colleagues, but I hope that people can understand the strategy and how the operating model serves the strategy.”

The restructure of Nine’s broadcast and streaming division comes as it contends with a drop in advertising dollars despite nightly audiences for its shows holding up – and even rising in some cases.

With three mediums to deliver content to audiences, broadcast television (Channel 9), free streaming (9Now) and premium streaming platform Stan, Laing has great optimism that the company can do more with the content it already has.

“The worst thing we can do is to not set ourselves up for success,” Laing said moments after addressing the new Streaming and Broadcast division in a town hall discussion on Monday afternoon.

“This is about transformation, it’s not just about saying, well, we want fewer people to do the same thing that more people did yesterday. What can we do differently?”

Nine News weather presenter Amber Sherlock was a casualty in last week’s cuts.

Broadcast TV drives more revenue and more earnings than publishing for Nine. However, its margins have been hardest hit by the decline in advertising. It also faces significant wage pressure, with on-air talent regularly paid salaries in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In October alone, the television ad market declined 13 per cent, adding to a years-long trend of declines for the sector that once scooped up half of every advertising dollar spent in Australia but has since been decimated by digital platforms such as Google and Facebook.

Unlike Seven, Nine has the flexibility of shuffling content across its free services and paid platform, Stan. It also has a healthy war chest following the sale of digital real estate listings firm Domain, though Laing was coy on whether Nine would find growth through acquisitions using the returns from that sale.

This could include the acquisition of a competitor streaming firm such as Binge, a rumoured bid for radio firm Nova Entertainment, scuppering Seven’s takeover by Southern Cross Austereo with a bid for the latter itself, or even the ongoing search for a buyer for radio stations 2GB and 3AW.

Six months into the role, Laing’s initial focus is on utilising Nine’s existing content to better effect, or in essence, “making more money out of a piece of content and a dollar of content investment spent”.

This includes launching a new Married at First Sight show on Stan next year, airing directly after each night’s programming on broadcast television, taking the show’s loyal fan base and translating some into paying subscribers. Nine also drove 3000 new Stan subscriptions by airing the first season of Bump on free-to-air while the second season was exclusive on Stan.

“I’m not naive,” Laing said. “I can see that the relationship between the audience and the revenue we can drive off that broadcast linear audience has changed over time. But we have this incredible foundation. We have the strongest IP in the country, in MAFS, 2.6 million Australians can’t be wrong.”

But part of that will include more difficult conversations, “finding efficiencies and taking costs out of the business” as Laing and her team continue to find the right balance of picking and choosing the mix of content on broadcast and streaming, in front of and behind the paywall.

This includes everything from news and entertainment to sport. Nine’s early approach to the English Premier League, its coverage of the Australian Open and last year’s Paris Olympic Games across both Channel Nine, 9Now and Stan will inform its approach to the coming NRL broadcast rights process, which again, Laing would not be drawn into commenting on directly.

Nine will probably face off against, or partner with, Foxtel, her employer until last year, to take the rights to rugby league beyond 2027.

“I think we’re doing incredibly well with the NRL content that we’ve got, whether or not we want to change that combination is yet to be seen, and when the rights process starts, we’ll have a look at that,” she said.