What you need to know

• Adobe has won the customer data platform contract at Nine, squeezing out Tealium and Salesforce. 
• With 20 million signed-in users, Nine wants to make it easier to move and measure audiences for Total TV and Total Audio, and Total Publishing.
• The deal also means it beefs up its technical expertise in a way that will help it work more closely with Domain, where it owns 60 per cent of the shares, and more deeply embed itself in retailer media following the launch of its RTLX unit.
• Meanwhile expect at least two big new public sector CDP deals to drop in the next quarter.

Adobe has emerged as the winner in one of the first top-tier CDP match ups for the year, beating out Tealium and Salesforce. The project is now in its implementation phase according to Nine CMO, Liana Dubois, who confirmed the decision to Mi3 Australia on Friday.

Media companies feature highly on Adobe's CDP client list. The martech vendor already has wins at News Corp, Carsales and SBS under its belt. CDPs are a natural fit in media groups that need to orchestrate audiences and IDs across an often disparate ecosystem of products, and where cookie deprecation is a direct threat to revenue. Carsales for instance, effectively rebuilt its Safari audience using Adobe and is counting on its CDP and an identity solution from Adfixus to help it through Chrome's cookie deprecation, without having to rely on Google's privacy sandbox.

The deal was actually a renewal at the end of a three year contract, but rather than simply rolling over the contract Nine opted for a competitive pitch. That could be considered a brave move with the Olympics closing in.

According to Dubois, "We made the choice to go with Adobe, and we are at the implementation phase of that project at this point in time."

"The reason we did it is simple. We are a large multimedia organisation with 20 million signed-in users across all our platforms. We saw it as a necessity as we head into a very, very different future with deprecation of cookies, a growing need for first-party data, and the necessity to improve things around data privacy," she said.

Dubois also flagged better customer experiences and improved marketing capabilities as important considerations. "We want to be able to support our advertisers to work smarter with our data."

Nine plans to unify data across Total TV, Total Audio and Total Publishing to provide a single view of the customer and a clear understanding of how its audiences are engaging with its channels plus its advertisers.

"We want to be able to more effectively move audiences through our ecosystem from a marketing point of view, and to make the user experiences more effective and more personalised," Dubois said.

The implementation of the CDP at Nine should also help it more tightly integrate with real estate site Domain (of which Nine owns 60 per cent), and which uses Tealium along with the Braze customer engagement platform.

"We work very closely with Domain, not just through data, but in a multi-faceted way to help them grow their business," Dubois said.

The CDP is likely to also prove on a boon on the retail media front. As Mi3 reported in September last year, Nine is making a defensive-offensive play into retailer media as it seeks to carve out a position for itself in one of Australia’s fastest growing ad market where brands aim to tap shoppers just before they buy – then use purchase and loyalty data to prove it worked.

At the launch of RTLX, its retail media unit last year, chief sales officer Michael Stephenson said Nine will enable both brands and retailers play full funnel. The data orchestration capabilities of the CDP should help Nine expedite that and help make up ground in a market that is starting to get crowded, where front-runner Cartology is powering, Coles 360 is investing significantly to catch up and other retailers are poised to join the likes of Endeavour and Chemist Warehouse in building media businesses.

Coming soon

A number of significant new CDP deals are scheduled to drop in the next month or so including Tourism NSW, which ran final presentations in early February. And at least one major NSW government tender — Department of Customer Services —  is expected to be announced before the end of H1.

This story was updated post publication to confirm Adobe was an incumbent at Nine.