After being appointed head of Nine’s women’s network in July, Helen McCabe was quick to pull together her pick of content creators – employing a host of new team members. Now she’s making her first major move when it comes to restructuring the business. The original-look fashion and beauty website 9Honey has been rebranded as 9Style, while the 9Honey brand is now the umbrella title for Nine’s entire women’s network portfolio.
The new 9Honey will be the hub for celebrity news site 9The Fix, cooking and recipe site 9Kitchen, interior design website 9Homes, fashion and beauty site 9Style, travel site 9Elsewhere, and fitness website 9Coach. 9Honey will also host new parenting site 9Mums, launching on Tuesday.
On the restructure, McCabe tells Mumbrella: “This is an evolution for us, I’ve pulled together the existing network and given it an overarching brand and pulled together a team. This is stage one for me and it’s not where we want to land. In some ways the announcement is the signal of the real work beginning where we go back to the drawing board and look at it from scratch.”
In an interview with AdNews, she continues: “A lot of ad dollars are going into that space but we hadn’t yet drawn it together as a proposition. It was clear to me we needed an overarching umbrella and that has become 9Honey. As we knew it, 9Honey was a fashion and beauty site which I didn’t think was the right fit.
“My ambition now is to integrate the TV business into our digital business. I have the fabulous advantage of the [Nine] TV network. It will be hard and I don’t expect we will get it all right and get cut through in a small amount of time, but I have a shot at it with Nine backing us – I’m banking on them. We might decide in 12 months time to do something completely different – the hard work begins now. This is just the first stage of the evolution."
