Tennis Australia has engaged Melbourne-based marketing and creative agency Underscore’s specialised influencer marketing division for the second year running.
This includes The Australian Open, United Cup, Internationals, and The Australian Open’s Finals Festival (the only music festival at a Grand Slam in the world).
The campaign saw Underscore collaborate with more than 500 influencers, and more than 2700 pieces of content generated, with a reach of more than 55 million.
Tennis Australia experienced record breaking attendance at the Australian Open this year with more than one million people attending.
Head of event brand marketing at Tennis Australia, Brittany Wickes, says the organisation wanted to “hit different” with its influencer strategy this past Summer.
"The dream team that is Elise Brando, Melanie Bowman and Matt Gardener curated a strategy that was fit for purpose for our audience needs and delivered at such scale with ease. To say our marketing team didn’t have to lift a finger is not an exaggeration," says Wickes.
Underscore (who has previously worked with major brands including Vans, The Daily Aus, Untitled Group, Live Nation, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sportsgirl and Cotton On) curated a campaign tailored to Tennis Australia's audience's needs.
This included a paid and contra campaign and boosting certain creators' content to gain bulk awareness and create quality content around the events, flooding news feeds across the country.
Matt Gardener, founder and managing partner of Underscore, says since the get-go, the agency's partnership with Tennis Australia has been one of shared ambition and collaboration.
"After delivering some great results for our engagement on Finals Festival last year, we wanted to go bigger with our 2024 engagement across all events, and deliver a world-class mass scale influencer marketing campaign," he says.
"The team at Tennis Australia put their trust in our ambition and allowed us to deliver something exceptional.”
Underscore’s head of influencer & creator marketing, Elise Brando, says the increased uptake for tailored influencer marketing campaigns is a result of more brands letting creators create in a way that's natural to them and their channels.
"Proving that authenticity is key which has always been our philosophy as an agency. I’m also noticing an increase in brands engaging specialised influencer marketing agencies as they would prefer to engage a team who are experts in the field to get the best results and best creative outcomes in influencer partnerships," she says.
"Our model as a specialised business unit allows us to stay more broadly in touch with cross culture and category trends and we can leverage learnings from the campaigns we run across everything we do, because we work at such a large scale and ensure we always have time to reflect on our campaigns and make them better Year on Year, which is exactly what we’ve done with Tennis Australia.”
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