Breaking the Digital Ceiling: Why Streaming TV is the High-Growth Engine Online Retailers Are Missing
Todd Fisher
Director, Nine Ad Manager
27th July, 2026
At the Online Retailer Conference in Sydney, Todd Fisher, Director of Nine Ad Manager, tackled a problem almost every e-commerce brand hits eventually: the digital ceiling. As performance marketing costs continue to climb, customer acquisition gets tougher. Todd broke down how forward-thinking brands are breaking through that growth wall by combining Connected TV (CTV) with self-serve digital speed.
Pictured: Todd Fisher at the Online Retailer Conference in Sydney
The Stagnation Trap: Are You Just Harvesting Intent?
If your marketing targets go up every year but your sales growth has flattened, you’re not alone. Most online retailers fall into the same trap: spending 100% of their budget on Search and Social.
"Search costs spike as you hit the ceiling of available ready-to-buy users," Fisher explained. "When you only hunt for existing demand, you end up fighting over the exact same limited pool of intent."
That pure "harvesting" strategy eventually runs out of road. To keep growing, brands need to balance Planting with Harvesting. CTV acts as the top-of-funnel engine, planting trust and brand familiarity at scale on the big screen so you can constantly feed fresh, high-intent audiences down into your performance channels.
The 9Now Advantage: Co-Viewing, Scale, and Trust
TV has always had an unmatched emotional impact, but streaming brings digital precision into the mix. Todd pointed to three massive advantages 9Now brings to growing retailers:
Visualising the CTV Halo Effect: The 72-Hour Consumer Journey
"The path to purchase can be messy and complicated," Fisher said. "What we find with advertisers using Nine Ad Manager is that a lot of branded search will increase, and your retargeting pools will increase across social."
To demonstrate how streaming TV supercharges performance channels, he walked the audience through a typical 72-hour consumer journey:
Day 1: The Initial Spark. A user watches The Block on the big screen via 9Now. Your brand seed is planted with full, unfragmented attention in a premium, highly trusted environment.
Day 2: Trusted Recall. The next day, the same user sees your ad on Instagram. By seeing the brand on TV, it built instant creditability. They recognise it, pause, and engage rather than skipping past.
Day 3: Branded Intent. Ready to purchase, the user goes to Google. Instead of typing in a generic, highly competitive category term, they search for your brand specifically, lowering your acquisition costs and securing the sale.
Take Control of Growth with Nine Ad Manager
Historically, TV advertising felt out of reach for growing e-commerce brands due to massive budget requirements, complex agency buying and costly production. Nine Ad Manager eliminates those barriers, giving businesses direct, self-serve access to Australia’s No.1 network and most loved shows.
Fisher highlighted four core features of the platform:
- Hyper-Targeted Data: Because 9Now viewers are logged in, brands can target using rich first-party data (postcode, age, gender, and masthead reading habits across Nine news sites) combined with third-party behavioural segments such as active online shoppers, renovators, auto buyers or fashion enthusiasts.
- AI-Powered Creative Generator: Don't have a TV ad? The platform features an AI tool that scans your existing website, extracts visual assets, writes a custom script, generates a professional voiceover, and lets you edit colors and fonts to stay on brand in minutes. Existing social video assets can also be uploaded directly.
- Flexible Budgets & Tentpole Campaigns: Campaigns start at just $500 plus GST with zero lock-in contracts. Retailers have full flexibility to run ongoing monthly campaigns or execute single-day, event-driven buys around tentpole broadcasts like The Block premiere or the NRL Grand Final.
- Cross-Device Pixel Attribution: Nine Ad Manager provides a dedicated pixel to track on-site conversions. By matching IP addresses between the connected TV viewing the ad and secondary devices (phones/laptops) browsing the web, the dashboard gives real-time visibility into page views, add-to-carts, and direct sales generated by TV exposure.
Fisher closed by live-demoing the platform, showing how a campaign can be built, targeted and submitted for review in under five minutes, backed by a Sydney-based support team that manually reviews campaigns before launch to ensure targeting and budget efficiency.
The takeaway for online retailers is clear: any business can now advertise on streaming TV. By combining big-screen authority with self-serve flexibility, Nine Ad Manager offers a clear pathway to break through the digital ceiling and create your own demand.
Sources: ThinkTV Australia (2023). Pay TV & BVOD Effectiveness / Sales Impact Study 2023. Metric: BVOD delivers 2x sales ROI vs. social video. Nine Entertainment (2024). Nine Audience Report 2024 (9Now Audience & Incremental Reach Data). Metric: 5.3M+ monthly audience, 19% incremental reach beyond linear TV, 36% YoY growth. PwC Australia (2023). PwC Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook / Advertising Trust Study 2023. Metric: TV/BVOD rated #1 trusted advertising medium at 49%.
