Melbourne-based marketing and creative agency, Underscore says it has seen remarkable success with its influencer marketing campaign for Tennis Australia's 2024 events. The campaign, which covered events such as The Australian Open, United Cup, Internationals, and The Australian Open’s Finals Festival, reportedly reached over 55 million people, generating more than 2700 pieces of content with the help of over 500 influencers.

Underscore says its campaign strategy was a mix of paid and contra campaigns, aimed at boosting creators' content to gain bulk awareness and create quality content around the events. The agency's database of over 12,000 TikTok and Instagram influencers and creators, and its strong relationships with them, played a crucial role in the campaign's success.

"We wanted to “hit different” with our influencer strategy this past Summer and 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," said Brittany Wickes, Head of Event Brand Marketing at Tennis Australia.

"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. The team at Tennis Australia put their trust in our ambition and allowed us to deliver something exceptional," said Matt Gardener, Founder and Managing Partner of Underscore.

Elise Brando, Underscore’s Head of Influencer & Creator Marketing, noted the increasing trend of brands engaging specialised influencer marketing agencies and letting creators create in a way that's natural to them. "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."

The agency's focus on TikTok as a vital brand channel was also highlighted. "TikTok is now a place for people to research about topics they're interested in, stay in touch with the news, and find reviews on any product or service they’re interested in trying. This is where influencer marketing comes in, people look to others for advice on products or services. We are now ensuring that every single one of our client campaigns includes TikTok as there are new creators popping up every single day who gain virality on their videos and gain an engaged audience," said Brando.

Underscore's close partnership with United Group, Australia’s largest independent music and events company, also contributed to the campaign's success. United Group led the music programming for the 2024 Finals Festival, featuring artists such as Groove Armada, Rudimental, Tash Sultana, Peach PRC, DMAs, Ruel, Jungle Giants and more.

Underscore says the success of the campaign was reflected in the record-breaking attendance at this year's Australian Open, with over 1 million people attending the event.