Why The Australian Open Isn't Selling Tennis Anymore

The Australian Open has always been bigger than tennis. But something has changed.

Walk through Melbourne Park this year and it is increasingly difficult to think of the Australian Open as simply a fortnight of elite sporting competition. There is live music, food, fashion, gaming, family entertainment, creators, brand activations and a steady stream of things to see and do between matches. The entire precinct has become part of the experience.

That evolution is deliberate. For the first time, the whole AO precinct opened from the beginning of Opening Week, with more than 63,000 people coming through the gates in the first two days alone, compared with 25,672 in 2025. The tournament has expanded its entertainment offering too, with AO LIVE turning the event into something closer to a 21-day summer festival.

The interesting thing for marketers is not simply that the Australian Open is attracting more people. It is the way it has built a platform around the sport that gives brands something much more valuable than a logo on a hoarding. It gives them a role in an experience people have actively chosen to be part of.

From sponsorship to participation

Traditional sports sponsorship has often been a fairly straightforward exchange. A brand pays for association with an event, receives visibility across broadcast and the venue, and builds some advertising around the partnership. There is nothing wrong with that model, but it is increasingly difficult to stand out when every major sporting property comes with a long list of official partners, each competing for a share of the same attention.

The more interesting partnerships are those that give the brand a reason to exist within the experience. realestate.com.au is a good example. As the new Official Real Estate Partner of the Australian Open, it is not simply putting its name around the tournament. Its campaign with Pat Rafter connects the brand's existing property platform with a cultural conversation that Australians already have around sport, home and lifestyle. Its activation gives fans something to participate in, while its media presence extends across the broadcast and the wider Melbourne experience.

That is a different proposition from simply buying visibility. The brand is finding a legitimate role within the occasion.

The best brand experiences give people something to do

This matters because people increasingly expect brands to create experiences rather than simply communications. We can see the same principle across the AO precinct. MECCA has turned its presence into a three-storey experience. There are food and beverage partnerships, interactive installations, family activities and live entertainment. Opening Week itself has been designed around discovery, with fans able to move between tennis, music, food, fashion and entertainment.

The lesson is not that every sponsorship needs a giant activation. It is that participation is more powerful than interruption. A billboard tells people that a brand is there. An experience gives them a reason to remember why.

That distinction becomes particularly important as audiences become harder to reach through conventional advertising. People may skip an ad, scroll past a post or ignore a sponsorship message. They are much less likely to forget an experience they actively enjoyed, particularly when the brand has played a credible role in making it happen. The best brand experiences do not feel like advertising that has been placed into an environment. They feel like part of the reason the environment is worth being in.

The AO has become a cultural platform

The most impressive thing about the Australian Open's evolution is the breadth of the audience it can now accommodate. You can come for the tennis, come for the music, bring the kids, meet friends for food and drinks, discover fashion and beauty brands, or follow the tournament through creators and social content without ever sitting through an entire match.

That breadth creates enormous value for the brands involved, but it also creates a challenge. The bigger the platform becomes, the harder it is for any individual brand to be distinctive within it. There are more brands, more experiences and more opportunities for audiences to move on to the next thing. That makes the quality of the idea increasingly important.

A brand cannot simply turn up because millions of people are there. It needs to know what it wants to contribute to the experience and why it has earned the right to be there. The strongest partnerships make the answer obvious. They take something the brand already has permission to talk about and connect it naturally to something people already care about.

Relevance is not enough

This is where sponsorship strategy can go wrong. Sport is attractive because it already comes with passion, emotion and an enormous audience, but borrowing those qualities does not automatically transfer them to a brand. The partnership has to make sense.

De Cecco's relationship with the Australian Open, for example, connects the brand's heritage and focus on quality with the performance, discipline and excellence associated with elite tennis. It has a clear conceptual connection rather than simply putting the brand alongside the tournament.

SafetyCulture takes another approach. Its campaign focuses on the people working behind the scenes to deliver the Australian Open, connecting the complexity of the event with the brand's role in workplace operations. It is a smart example of sponsorship because the partnership is rooted in something the brand genuinely has a role in.

The principle is simple: the strongest partnerships answer the question, “Why this brand, here?” Without a good answer, even a huge audience can become expensive wallpaper.

The experience is becoming part of the brand

There is a broader lesson here for marketers. As media becomes more fragmented and advertising becomes easier to produce and distribute, the physical and emotional experience around a brand becomes increasingly valuable.

People remember what they did, who they were with, how something made them feel and the stories they took away from it. Those memories can be far more powerful than another piece of communication that appeared in a feed for a few seconds. This does not make advertising less important. It makes the relationship between advertising and experience more important.

The job is no longer simply to get people to notice a brand. It is to give them a reason to spend time with it, to participate in something, or to associate the brand with a moment they would have wanted to experience anyway. That is a fundamentally different creative challenge, and one the Australian Open is embracing particularly well. The tournament has built a world around the sport rather than expecting the sport to do all the work.

For brands, this should change the way sponsorship is approached. The starting point should not be how many people will see the logo or how many impressions a partnership can generate. Those things matter, but they are measures of exposure rather than measures of meaning. A better question is what the brand can create, enable or contribute that people will genuinely value and remember.

That might be an experience, a service, a piece of content, a ritual, a product or a moment that could only exist because the brand and the property came together. It might be relatively simple. What matters is that it feels natural to the brand and useful or enjoyable to the audience.

The best partnerships do not feel like a brand has bought its way into someone else's event. They feel like the brand belongs there. That is the real opportunity of the Australian Open. It is no longer simply a place where brands can reach tennis fans. It is a cultural platform where brands can participate in one of Australia's biggest annual moments.

And perhaps that is where sponsorship is heading more broadly. Not towards brands owning more space around an event, but towards brands creating something that makes the event itself better.

The Australian Open understands that. The brands that make the most of it will be the ones that understand it too.