SBS has revealed a suite of new commercial partnerships spanning out-of-home, creators, multicultural retail, sustainability and outcomes-based measurement, as the national broadcaster looks to give brands more ways to take its content and cultural moments beyond the screen.
Announced at SBS’s 2027 Upfronts in Sydney, the partnerships include oOh!media, Guardian Australia, Fabulate, Multicultural Outdoor (MCO), CommBank iQ and HYP.
Rather than simply selling brands access to its TV, audio and digital properties, SBS is looking to build broader campaigns around its content, audience data and cultural expertise — connecting broadcast exposure with OOH, social creators, retail environments and measurable consumer behaviour.
“These partnerships create new opportunities for brands to extend the impact of those moments beyond the screen, helping advertisers build more connected campaigns across multiple environments,” SBS acting director of media sales Lee Fifoot said.
So what do the partnerships entail?
One of the biggest audience extensions comes through a new exclusive partnership with oOh!media, which sees SBS News content distributed across the OOH operator’s office, university and airport network.
SBS News will appear across more than 6,300 oOh!media lift and lobby screens, with content also extending into airport terminals and universities.
Across these environments, SBS estimates the partnership has the potential to reach more than 10.6 million people over 12 months and deliver 5.28 billion impressions.
oOh!media chief product and marketing officer Bel Harper said SBS News would be entering some of the company’s “highest-value audience environments”, including audiences with significant dwell time and frequency.
SBS is also bringing Guardian Australia into its annual Sustainability Challenge, expanding the initiative’s available advertising inventory to $700,000 for 2027.
The initiative, now entering its third year, is designed to encourage brands to normalise sustainable behaviour and promote better environmental practices among Australian consumers.
The winning campaign will receive advertising inventory across television and digital, with a jury of industry professionals determining the winner.
SBS CulturalConnect national manager Kate Young said the partnership would significantly increase the inventory available through the challenge.
“This is a natural partnership of two leading media players keen to drive further awareness in this area,” Young said.
Alongside expanding its media footprint, SBS is also putting greater emphasis on proving what its advertising actually delivers.
The broadcaster has partnered with CommBank iQ and HYP to introduce outcomes-based measurement for eligible advertisers, combining SBS’s first-party audience data with aggregated consumer spending behaviour and other real-world outcomes.
Through CommBank iQ, advertisers will have access to three solutions: Pitch iQ for category and brand insights, Measure iQ to connect campaign sales outcomes with audience profiles, and Segment iQ, which enables activation of more than 500 spend-based SBS audience segments.
The data is provided in aggregated, non-identifiable form through secure environments.
HYP will meanwhile provide behavioural audience targeting and measurement, allowing eligible advertisers to assess whether people exposed to campaigns subsequently visited a brand’s website or physical locations. Exposed and control groups can then be used to identify incremental uplift.
The partnerships build on SBS’s existing measurement capabilities with Adobe, Snowflake and InfoSum, as well as brand-lift relationships with Attest, Kantar and McNair.
Fifoot said the move reflected marketers’ increasing focus on demonstrating ROI to the C-suite.
“We have seen the market move rapidly in the last few years with the rise of MMMs and more ROI driven discussions being had between marketers and the C-Suite,” he said.
“At SBS we know the power of advertising on our network and we want to empower marketers and their agencies to be able to show that effectiveness when they are doing their channel planning.”s.
SBS is also looking to extend its major content moments into the creator economy and retail through partnerships with Fabulate and MCO.
Its deal with Fabulate will give advertisers access to diverse creators capable of extending SBS campaigns into social and creator-led environments.
The partnership follows SBS’s Hisense Hangout activation around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, where creators helped extend the fan experience beyond the broadcast.
Under the new arrangement, Fabulate will bring its network of 1.45 million Australian creators to SBS commercial partnerships, allowing brands to extend moments across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Fabulate co-founder and CRO Ben Gunn said the partnership would combine “the scale of SBS with the influence of creators”.
“SBS creates some of the biggest cultural and sporting moments in Australia, and increasingly those moments don’t end when the broadcast does,” Gunn said.
The broadcaster is also partnering with MCO to bring campaigns into multicultural retail environments.
One in three Australians speak a language other than English at home, according to SBS, with the partnership designed to help advertisers reach diverse communities in more relevant environments.
‘From couch to community’
Meanwhile, the oOh!media partnership has a broader commercial application, with the two companies entering an exclusive agreement to create specialised packages for brands sponsoring SBS’s 2027 Tour de France coverage.
The packages will allow sponsors to extend their campaigns from broadcast into OOH, linking one of SBS’s major sporting properties with oOh!media’s national network.
Taken together, the deals point to SBS pushing towards a more connected commercial proposition — one that combines its content, audience data and cultural expertise with external media environments, creators, retail and measurable business outcomes.
As Young put it, the ambition is to help brands take a single idea “from couch to community to counter”, rather than confining a campaign to one screen or channel.
