The Brisbane Heat’s 2025–26 Big Bash League season may have ended short of finals, but off the field the club delivered one of the strongest fan engagement and attendance performances in its fifteen year history.
In partnership with Sunny Advertising who led the Heat’s digital advertising strategy, the Heat saw more than 150,000 fans pass through the gates in five matches this season.
Nic Laube head of marketing and digital at Brisbane Heat, said the campaign helped deliver the Heat’s most attended BBL season in eight years with three sellouts and a fourth match reaching 97 per cent capacity with an average crowd of 30,000 spectators.
“These results reflect the sustained momentum we have built over the past two seasons working with the team at Sunny Advertising. This season we broke our largest home attendance in eight seasons three times across consecutive games, that level of demand shows how strongly fans reconnected with the Heat,” Nic said.
Sunny Advertising CEO Sarah McNeil said the campaign was shaped by key learnings from last season with a strong focus on scale, flexibility and measurement.
“The campaign was built on behaviour-based targeting, purchase-propensity modelling and real-time optimisation to maximise impact across ticket sales and fan engagement.
“We’ve found that spectator demand shifts game by game in the BBL, so success depended on making the right decisions at the right moments and turning early momentum into sustained sell-outs.
“Rather than relying on static budgets or fixed flighting, we implemented a performance-led strategy that allowed us to scale investment in line with real demand throughout the season,” McNeil said.
Sunny Advertising’s senior digital media specialist Dale Hickey said entering the market earlier, applying season-on-season learnings and optimising daily, helped to deliver attendance growth of more than 17,000 year-on-year.
“Using this strategy we spent nine per cent less than the previous season and finished the season under budget,” he said.
Laube said the Heat’s off-field success extended beyond matchday attendance. Two matches attracted more than one million national average viewers, with the club recording a 762,000 average TV audience across the home and away season. The Heat’s WBBL viewership also increased 23 per cent year-on-year.
“Our broadcast numbers were among the strongest we’ve seen, with multiple games reaching more than a million viewers nationally. At the same time, we continued to lead digitally, generating 631 million social media views and for the ninth consecutive year, we have been recognised as the most followed sporting club in Oceania.”
