Nine has renewed its partnership with ad technology company Mantis, extending the use of Mantis brand safety and contextual advertising tools across Nine's digital properties and into its app environments.
The companies said the next phase of the relationship will include deeper integration into Nine apps, including Nine's GoodFood app. Nine said it expects the expansion to reach additional readers across its digital portfolio, which spans news, lifestyle, sport and entertainment.
Blocklists scrutiny
Nine and Mantis positioned the renewal around the impact of keyword blocklists on publisher inventory. Nine said an analysis across 498 Nine URLs found agency blocklists labelled 285 pages as not brand safe. Nine said Mantis identified 47 pages as genuinely unsafe.
Nine said the approach increased the volume of pages available to advertisers. It cited more than 120% more brand-safe inventory and an increase of 219 brand-safe pages.
The companies also said they will continue work on "keyword blocklist thought leadership". They linked that work to refining Mantis systems using Nine inventory and editorial context.
Campaign results
Nine also pointed to sales lift figures from a contextual campaign on GoodFood, one of its food and lifestyle brands. Nine said the campaign targeted relevant content categories for a grocery client and ran alongside recipes and dining articles.
Nine said attribution reporting from the brand partner showed a 34% uplift in sales among poultry buyers. It also cited nearly 50% uplift among fresh food buyers.
Separately, Nine referenced advertising rules during its coverage of the Olympics in Australia. Nine said it faced contractual restrictions from the International Olympic Committee and the Australian Olympic Committee on advertiser requirements. Nine said Mantis navigated those restrictions and met Olympic advertising requirements.
Nine said the work sets a precedent for the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026. The publisher said the event will offer advertisers another opportunity to run campaigns with contextual controls during a major sports moment.
App expansion
The renewed partnership adds focus on app inventory, as publishers and advertisers look for more predictable environments and identity signals change across the web. Nine flagged the GoodFood app as one area of expansion.
App environments also create different content and ad delivery patterns from the open web. Publishers often package apps as premium inventory because of logged-in audiences, repeat usage and tighter control of placements.
Brands have also increased scrutiny of where ads appear. That has made brand safety tools a routine part of media buying, while also increasing debate over "over-blocking", where broad restrictions reduce reach and depress publisher revenues.
Publisher view
"Mantis offers a unique advantage because it was designed and built by a publisher. We are fully confident that Mantis has a deep, innate understanding of the daily challenges we face as a publisher, especially the issue of imprecise and overly cautious buy-side blocking that often affects premium inventory and delivery," said Daniel Roman, National Data Commercialisation Manager, Nine.
"By leveraging Mantis, we can provide our advertisers with the utmost confidence that their ads will be brand-safe, while simultaneously unlocking a significant amount of premium inventory that would have been blocked by less sophisticated brand safety and contextual tools. Our partnership allows Nine to offer a solution that is both brand-suitable for advertisers and commercially optimised for our business."
Nine also linked the partnership to its wider commercial strategy. It said the work aligns with priorities that include growing Total Publishing data revenue, increasing ad yield and improving sell-through rates. Nine also cited broader efforts to embed AI into operational and targeting practices.
Mantis perspective
"We're extremely pleased about our partnership with Nine to date, delivering successful brand safety and suitability solutions, which have translated into sales lift results for its advertisers. We're excited to continue working with the team there and look forward to further expanding this to prove what we can deliver in the app environment," said Ben Pheloung, General Manager, Mantis.
Mantis launched in 2019 and operates as a brand safety and contextual advertising provider. The company says its tools cover brand safety, contextual targeting, recommendation and natural language processing.
Nine and Mantis said the renewed work will extend across more of Nine's inventory. They pointed to further integration in apps as the next area of focus.