Upfront season has officially kicked off. The first cab off the rank was SBS, which served up attendees with a tasty lunch as well as some announcements at Sydney Town Hall.
The return to the lunch format went down well with the media buyers B&T spoke to. Last year, the public broadcaster opted for a sport-themed Upfront ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which proved a huge success for the network — though sadly not the Socceroos. In fact, more than 18 million Australians turned to SBS and SBS on demand to watch the tournament.
With that in mind, the common feedback from media buyers was that SBS remain very clear on its strengths and continues to play to them.
This can be seen by the extension of the broadcaster’s 2027 content slate.
Across SBS, four new documentaries are set to launch: Ray Martin is Misinformed, Homeless 300, Bondi and NITV co-commission 2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback.
These sit alongside major new international drama acquisition Legacy of Spies, while Alone Australia ventures to the Arctic Circle for its fifth season, and three new Australian scripted series from SBS, NITV, and Screen Australia’s Digital Originals initiative showcase distinctive new voices.
Throughout the year, NITV will also mark 20 years of Blak excellence, the Eurovision Song Contest will head to Bulgaria following another huge year with Australian audiences, The Cook Up celebrates its 1,000th episode and there will be more than 850 hours of top-class (if tedious) cycling coverage on SBS.
This broad range of content is good. As Marille Salib, chief media partnerships officer at Omnicom Media, said: “SBS has the most diverse Australian audience of any media partner”.
‘Couch, to community, to counter’
The formal proceedings of the Upfront was kicked off by SBS MD, Jane Palfreyman who said that through its new partnerships SBS can take brands “From couch, to community, to counter”.
These new partnerships include deals with oOh!media, The Guardian Australia, Fabulate, Multicultural Outdoor (MCO), CommBank iQ and HYP. They cover everything from out-of-home to creators, multicultural retail, sustainability and outcomes-based measurement.
Nunn Media MD Chris Walton was pleased, if not over-awed by the partnerships. “None of them are a silver bullet, but they all do offer an interesting added dimension to dealing with the network,” he told B&T.
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.
oOh!media’s partnership also extends to the Tour de France. As a result SBS and oOh!media will go to market with specialised packages enabling brands sponsoring SBS’s 2027 Tour de France coverage to extend campaigns into OOH environments.
For Salib, that was an “amazing extension”.
“We’ve seen it done successfully. QMS did it for the Paris Olympics and the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, and we had a lot of success,” she said, pointing to the incremental business growth its client, Patties Food Group, received from activating the QMS Olympics package, but not broadcast.
“This and other partnerships give brands a different way to connect in with audiences outside of their traditional broadcast to bring clients into culture,” she said.
We asked Salib whether the success of the Olympic Games’ packages resulted purely from the number of eyeballs. She countered that a lot of consumers are only interested in certain events, not the entire event from start to finish. Much to the chagrin of the equestrians no doubt.
“You could argue that the consumers who are consuming the Tour de France are engaged from the from the get-go, and the attention that it drives could be significantly more,” she added.
For Ori Gold, CEO and co-founder Bench Media, the partnerships provide an “opportunity for clients”. But only if SBS is transparent.
“The danger may be, and what I would look for, is to make sure that the measurement piece and how these are tied together are properly integrated and properly measured. Make sure that we’re not just falling into just a package for a package’s sake,” he told B&T.
Another partnership outlined at the Upfront was with creator marketing platform Fabulate. The deal will give advertisers access to diverse creators capable of extending SBS campaigns into social and creator-led environments.
This is particularly useful for indie agencies, who may not have the same access to the same breadth of social expertise as holdcos do or specialist social agencies.
The deal certainly piqued Mayra Godwin’s interest.
“A lot of clients have been interested in seeing how they can convert people in a more personal level,” SPEED’s investment manager told B&T.
“One way is by using influencers and social media, which is why clients have been following that space a lot. There’s definitely an opportunity there.”
Salib said that this probably won’t be leveraged by any of the holdcos as “most already have their own content creator team”.
Measurement
The broadcaster also announced it had 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.
Walton concluded by praising the content slate, but expressing his frustration of how SBS didn’t show brands how it would deliver for them.
“Whilst the quality and choice are undeniable, in an age when we are awash in content, excess reach and competition for attention, one area that was missing from their presentation was marketing. How do they plan to tell Australians about all the great stuff they have? That was a disappointment,” he said.
