Interesting article how Tennis Australia is killing it with new sponsors, existing ones and game day experience. Dare say Nine and Stan will be benefitting from this in their viewer numbers.
Take note NRL is this the future of the fan`s sporting experience.
The Australian Open is on-track for a record-breaking year as Tennis Australia’s strategy to integrate music, tech, food and brand activations drives growth in visitors, brand partnerships and revenues.
The grand-slam tennis event, which still has a week of matches to complete, has already recorded its highest ever daily attendance figure of 95,881 visitors, suggesting this year’s tournament will outperform last year’s record 1.1 million visitors. Last year’s event also delivered a surge in broadcast viewers up 40 per cent globally, and 30 per cent in Australia.
The growth is being driven by a strategy to broaden the event’s appeal beyond tennis by incorporating music, tech and food, to provide more ways to engage people, according to Tennis Australia’s director of partnerships and international business Roddy Campbell.
“The Australian Open is so much more than tennis,” he said. “You can come and have a drink in the sunshine, you can bring your kids to the ballpark. You can come and watch music festivals. We conquered the tennis fan a decade ago and have been on a journey of segmenting and creating this festival atmosphere with the best food, restaurant pop ups, bars, stores, activations, we’ve even got a tech incubator that goes on during the AO.”
Mr Campbell said the ambition was to establish the Australian Open as the most “pioneering festival in the world” and this global ambition had driven an increased focus on a regionalisation strategy that saw the AO tap into key overseas markets such as China, Japan and South America.
“Most people don’t realise that the Australian Open is the biggest Grand Slam in terms of attendance and audience. The AO is bigger than the US Open and bigger than Wimbledon. So pure media reach for global brands is a big part of the appeal of an event like ours.”
The Open has capitalised on the significant brand interest adding a host of new sponsors this year such as Haier, Red Bull, Grey Goose, Pirelli and M & Ms to its long list of existing sponsors such as Kia, Rolex, Emirates and MasterCard, which have been on board with the event for 24, 18, 11 and nine years respectively.
The Tennis Australia team works with the partners to create branded activities that will entertain tennis fans, while also attracting new visitors who might be seeking a different experience.
The 2025 Australian Open campaign, created by agency BMF, aims to showcase the diversity and variety of activities and attractions at this year's event.
This year’s event includes bars, retail shops and interactive games. It is a “world class playbook for how rightsholders, and brands, can connect to a diverse set of audience passions,” according to M & C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment managing director Krystyna Frassetto.
“Tennis as a sport cannot compete with the fandom for AFL, NRL or football, which have longer seasons, more homegrown stars, and communities of fans who coalesce around a team or player.
“Our annual Passion Pulse research reveals there are up to five times the number of Australians who are passionate about any of those sports as there are (about) tennis. However, much of the AO’s success lies in its ability to blend audience passions to create a diverse and multidimensional lifestyle and entertainment proposition, tapping into our love of food, drinks, games, music and socialising.
“The event itself overshadows the tennis for fans, with so much activity with more fans attending the precinct en masse (80,000 - 100,000), compared to the arenas per day for over two weeks.”
Ms Frassetto said with the inclusion of tech/gaming, exclusive dining experiences and concerts, the AO has not only diversified its audience with more younger people, it has also created new revenue streams, particularly through concert ticket sales.
In a bid to further diversify revenues, the AO has also leaned into regionalisation strategies to capitalise on its international audiences. The strategy kicked off with China, where Tennis Australia established an office eight years ago and invests in marketing, social content and events, “throughout the year”.
Building on this, the AO now uses technology to localise and target sponsor logos based on regions and support this with local brand activities and social media support to create an integrated local marketing effort. “We have partners that are just in China,” Mr Campbell said. “So we have Luckin Coffee (Starbucks’ Chinese rival), vitamin brand EZZ and HSBC as our banking partner in China. If you’re in China, you see these brands, but you don’t even see them in Melbourne Park.”
With the technology and strategy in place in China, Mr Campbell said the AO was looking to implement it in other key markets.
“We’re looking at regional partnerships in South America, in Japan, we might have Stella as the beer partner in North America, whereas Peroni is our partner in Australia. So we’re actually selling mini partnerships beneath the top global ones,” he said.
“Technology has definitely fuelled how localised and hyper localised we can be. With AI we can quickly create match day highlights for Chinese players and send that to Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) in China.
“Now we are looking at how we can make the AO super relevant in Japan and we’re constantly kind of evaluating the big markets for us, but yeah, that’s the fun part.
“That’s really what I want to spend a lot of my time on next year, just continuing to grow the strength of the AO brand and make it hyper relevant. So while we’re the biggest, can we be the most loved in some of those key markets?”
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