Nine's suite of digital brands, including 9Now, 9News, Wide World of Sports, plus its Microsoft products MSN, Skype and Outlook will shift all ad inventory over to AppNexus's server, which will include sponsorships, a private marketplace and real-time bidding.

Nine chief digital and marketing officer Alex Parsons said the move helped bring the broadcaster and publisher into the future, where Nine's digital assets had been previously relying on a Microsoft product, dating back to when ninemsn was a joint venture between the two companies. Nine dumped the ninemsn brand in favour of nine.com.au last week.

"The issue with that is Microsoft's ad technology was built for Microsoft product and wasn't built as an off-the-shelf or broad-scale market technology, which is available to multiple partners," Mr Parsons said.

"We had been battling through and applying a technology that really wasn't built for the purpose that we were using it for. This change, I believe puts us in the world-class arena and our ad-stack now in this market has moved from being from, in all honesty, average to being great."

The change means Nine will have one ad system covering all its digital assets rather than two that fed into each other – the idea being it will be more efficient not just for Nine, but for its advertisers.

"The key differentiator of where we were yesterday and where we are today is our ability to be more effective with how to fulfil our clients' needs and demands for the inventory across our network," Mr Parsons said.

Nine has previously used AppNexus for its programmatic offering.

AppNexus global chief executive and co-founder Brian O'Kelley said the deal with Nine would help it address competition with technology giants such as Google and Facebook by giving them a simpler ad technology.

"If you walk into an agency and say 'we're going to compete with a Google or Facebook', you have to have better technology, you have to have a better platform, better targeting and a whole list of things that allow you to compete at that. That's what this partnership does, it's world-class content and a world-class technology platform to monetise that content," Mr O'Kelley said.

Mr O'Kelley said that AppNexus had invested around $250 million in building its publisher suite to combine traditional display advertising tools with video, native and mobile advertising as well as forecasting.

"It does some really cool yield-management techniques which allows us to choose the highest value and, we hope, the most relevant ad for every consumer at every page, or every part of the app they see," he said.

"It really combines to allow a forward looking publisher like Nine to get the full value for their content and to fund the development of new content, and to really out-compete a lot of the global media companies that I think are an inherent threat to their business."