Ninemsn moves to calm market fears over turmoil

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This was published 15 years ago

Ninemsn moves to calm market fears over turmoil

By Paul McIntyre

PBL MEDIA and Microsoft have moved quickly to counter market concerns about the string of senior management departures at ninemsn.

They have backed a restructure of the portal's commercial operations and approved a 10 per cent increase in staff, mostly for a new "integrated" sales division.

The restructure is a result of a three-month review headed by PBL Media's head of sales and marketing, Joe Pollard, who ruled out her candidacy this week to replace ninemsn's chief executive, Tony Faure. Ms Pollard said she would remain with ninemsn until a replacement is found for former commercial director Jason Scott, which she said could take another three months.

Ms Pollard also rejected suggestions that ninemsn's audience numbers were in decline. She said a fall of 300,000 users in April was a blip and ninemsn had since recovered to a monthly audience base of about 8.2 million. "Year-on-year, our audience is up 23 per cent," she said.

There has been conjecture about PBL Media's reluctance to invest in ninemsn in favour of cost-cutting and extracting higher returns from the business, which is said to be at odds with its 50 per cent joint venture partner, Microsoft. Ms Pollard denied this.

"The reorganisation we have put in place demonstrates we're putting additional resources into the company and is testament to the fact we are very aggressive about our future growth," she said. "The shareholders are positive about ninemsn's growth. All the recommendations the team here put together were accepted by the board and we are running at a thousand miles an hour to execute them."

As part of Ms Pollard's review, ninemsn has moved to an integrated sales structure. The previously separate teams selling online, mobile, video and performance advertising has been streamlined into single units to service the media-buying and advertising agency sector.

Ms Pollard and the director of sales in Sydney, Michael Stephenson, have briefed the market in the past week on the overhaul.

"We weren't going to market in a cohesive way and we didn't have enough resources in client-facing roles to be as proactive as we could," Ms Pollard said. "We basically now have a one-stop shop, whereas before agencies could have four or five people from ninemsn approaching them at any one time. The industry response has been fantastic."

She said ninemsn's reorganisation was not a result of the market's biggest portal losing momentum. "I don't think the momentum issue is a reasonable criticism," she said.

"Eighteen months in digital media is like four years in the mainstream media world. We've done this to maintain and extend our leadership position."

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