Nine Deepens Mantis Partnership for Enhanced Brand Safety

Australia – Nine has renewed its partnership with advertising technology company Mantis after deploying the company’s AI-driven brand safety and contextual advertising tools across its digital platforms. The renewed agreement will see Nine continue to use Mantis’s technology across its news, lifestyle, sport and entertainment content, while also exploring deeper integration within its app environments, including the GoodFood app. The partnership aims to improve ad safety, targeting accuracy and audience engagement across Nine’s digital ecosystem. As part of the collaboration, the two companies will continue to focus on reducing reliance on keyword blocklists through contextual and AI-based approaches. According to an analysis conducted across 498 Nine URLs, agency blocklists flagged 285 pages as not brand safe, while Mantis’s technology identified 47 pages as genuinely unsafe after accounting for editorial context. Nine said the use of Mantis resulted in more than a doubling of brand-safe inventory and a significant increase in available pages deemed suitable for advertising. Beyond brand safety, Nine reported campaign performance outcomes linked to Mantis’s contextual targeting capabilities. A recent campaign on Nine’s food and lifestyle site, GoodFood, targeted specific content categories for a grocery advertiser, placing ads alongside relevant recipes and dining articles. Based on attribution reporting from the brand partner, the campaign delivered a 34% uplift in sales among poultry buyers and nearly a 50% uplift among fresh food buyers. Nine also pointed to the role of Mantis during its coverage of the Olympic Games in Australia, where strict advertising requirements set by the International Olympic Committee and the Australian Olympic Committee applied. Mantis supported Nine in meeting these contractual obligations while enabling advertisers to participate in Olympic-related content. The companies said this experience provides a foundation for advertising opportunities around the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics in 2026. “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 at Nine. He added, “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.” Meanwhile, Ben Pheloung, general Manager at Mantis, said: “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.” Nine said the renewed partnership aligns with its broader strategy to grow publishing data revenue, improve advertising yield and sell-through rates, and expand the use of AI across its operations and targeting practices. By combining AI-driven contextual tools with its editorial content, Nine aims to offer advertisers inventory that is both brand-safe and contextually relevant.