In a virtual event on Thursday morning, Nine has launched its tennis coverage for 2022.
With Ash Barty and Dylan Alcott leading the world tennis rankings and coming off strong Wimbledon performances, Nine has promised to deliver huge audiences and provide marketers and brands with a unique platform to begin their calendar year plans.
James Bracey hosted the event which featured a panel with Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley, Jelena Jokic, and Jim Courier. Tiley said the thing that he is looking forward to the most is hopefully an Australian winning the Australian Open.
Nine also showed a sizzle reel on what to expect from the coverage in 2022, the first year that Nine can offer marketers and brands an integrated solution across television (both metro and also regional for the first time), as well as print, radio and digital.
Bracey then spoke to Brent Williams, Nine’s director of sport about how the pandemic has affected Nine’s coverage and resulted in improvements in the broadcaster’s approach to covering the sport, their event offerings, broadcast team, and the unprecedented access that they will be giving fans next year.
“We can’t wait for the Australian Open to kick-start 2022 before continuing the momentum into the other Grand Slams of Roland Garros and Wimbledon, all of which deliver highly engaged audiences for us,” said Williams.
“We saw Wimbledon smash records on Nine this year, with well over two million people tuning in to watch Ash Barty fulfil her childhood dream of winning the Wimbledon title. Those audiences will be tuning in for the Australian Open and Nine’s Summer of Tennis.”
Bracey then spoke to Anne Gruber, the head of content partnerships at Nine about how brands can engage with the tennis to achieve lucrative results using the results of Tokyo 2020 as an example. She also discussed the touchpoints the Nine offer across print, radio, TV, and digital.
Matt Granger, Nine’s director of sales – sport, noted that summer would be a major inflection point for Australia as agreed vaccination benchmarks are set to be achieved and key states transition out of lockdown.
“After almost two years of living with a pandemic, we believe the summer of 2022 will be a real turning point,” said Granger. “We have seen this year that sport is the one thing which has brought us together as we cheer for and celebrate our heroic athletes. As we look ahead the Australian Open will do just that and help to inspire a nation.
“The Australian Open is on the world stage in terms of timing, reach, impact and effectiveness.”
“Nine has invested heavily to create an unrivalled content and total TV strategy,” said Granger. “The blend of assets at Nine delivers our audiences something unique that no other media company in the world can offer.
“From print, radio, digital and now to TV, on both a metro and regional basis, we really have a powerful combination of touchpoints when it comes to tennis.”
He pointed to the results achieved by major brand partners over the past three summers of the Australian Open, such as Kia, Samsung and Swinburne University. As measured through Nine’s marketing solutions division, Powered, all three demonstrated significant uplifts in brand consideration, awareness and purchase intent.
Granger said: “Tennis is the only proven summer platform to increase brand perceptions. We have looked at the average uplift across all brand metrics measured for our major sponsors of Nine’s Summer of Tennis over the past three years, and we found that the biggest impact is on perceptions of quality, trust and innovation.
“For any marketer looking to increase any of these metrics, Tennis on Nine is not just the perfect platform but also the most effective.”