Month: April 2019

Nine.com.au’s first investigative news podcast series, ‘Maddie’, has been downloaded more than one million times since its launch last month.

The nine-part examination of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old British girl who vanished in Portugal in 2007, released its eighth episode earlier this week.

With one episode remaining, ‘Maddie’ is still in the top 10 podcast programs on the iTunes Podcast rankings, after hitting number one in both the Australian and UK podcasting charts.

‘Maddie’ is the culmination of two years of work on the McCann mystery by senior nine.com.au journalist, Mark Saunokonoko.

The podcast comes nearly 12 years after Madeleine McCann disappeared and explores what could have happened to her.

The podcast is supported with a content hub for people who want to read up on the case, look at images including maps of the resort Maddie was last seen in, and view the McCanns’ apartment she disappeared from.

You can listen to ‘Maddie’ here.

Good integration is a combination play that can really drive the marketing performance of a business, argues Mim Haysom, Suncorp Group’s CMO and EGM Brand & Marketing.

Speaking on a panel at the Future TV Advertising Forum in Sydney recently, Haysom noted the powerful influence that integration can have when the “context and content combination” is right.

“Integration far outweighs a traditional buy in terms of brand impact for us,” Haysom said while speaking about Suncorp’s partnerships with Nine.

“If we could do more integration I would be thrilled because the results we get far outweigh traditional spots and dots – and not that we talk that way anymore,” she laughed.

Nine’s Chief Sales Officer, Michael Stephenson, agreed with Haysom’s remarks by using the partnership between Suncorp and Nine as an example to highlight the notion that everything old is new again in integration.

“The notion around the big idea and creativity coming back to the core of what we do is really important,” Stephenson said. “Bringing creativity back to the core and creating big ideas for brands like Suncorp in our shows, in and around our content, and distributing those ideas across all the assets we individually own.

“You need to be more creative than your competitor to deliver real sales growth, and if you do that I think it’s a winning formula.”

Fellow panel member, GroupM’s Chief Investment Officer, Nicola Lewis, also commented on the importance of integrated partnerships.

“Partnerships are absolutely integral to a plan. I think clients need to have a focus in that area,” Lewis said. “To get ahead of a really good proposition is a great thing for a client to do and then ride that wave.

“The beautiful thing now is that you don’t necessarily need to have TV-led integration. It could be across device that the integration is led from.”