Team Toby crosses the finish line as Toby’s Estate completes its marathon campaign
Toby’s Estate has wrapped an integrated campaign around its role as Official Coffee Partner of the 2026 TCS Sydney Marathon presented by ASICS, using the most ownable asset in the business, the name Toby, to find runners, build a community and show up across the city.
Developed to stand apart in a crowded sponsorship field, Team Toby began with a national search for marathon entrants named Toby. The callout, which ran across street posters, digital out of home, PR and socials, turned the partnership into a public hunt for namesake runners and gave audiences an immediate reason to engage.
Over 170 people applied to join Team Toby, with seventeen Tobys ultimately selected to join the team, with four lead runners receiving major sponsorship packs to support their training, race and recovery.
A campaign built to travel
The concept expanded in the lead-up to race day through a second wave of digital out-of-home placements across Sydney. Contextual creative spoke to spectators with lines including “they’ve got 42.2km. you’ve got coffee.” and “cheering is thirsty work … apparently”, directing people to Toby’s Estate pop-up activations at SCG Driver Avenue and Customs House.
Online, Team Toby content attracted almost one million organic views during marathon week, a 1,343 per cent increase on the brand’s previous content reach and its best-performing organic social content to date. Ninety per cent of those views came from non-followers, extending the campaign well beyond Toby’s Estate’s existing audience.
The campaign then moved from feeds to feet. On the Friday before the marathon, 250 runners joined a three-kilometre Team Toby shakeout run through Sydney. Across race weekend, the Toby’s Estate Customs House pop-up served thousands of coffees to runners, supporters and spectators.
A simple idea with a distinctive role
“Marathon week is a very crowded starting line for brands, so we knew we needed an idea that could only ever belong to us,” says Bridget Taylor, Marketing Manager at Toby’s Estate. “Team Toby took the most obvious thing about our brand and had a lot more fun with it. We went looking for a few Tobys and ended up with thousands of people joining the search, hundreds signing up to run with us and a whole lot of Sydney drinking our coffee. Not bad for one little name.”
From recruiting its namesakes to fuelling the city, Team Toby gave the coffee roaster a distinctive role in one of Australia’s biggest sporting moments. More than 35,000 runners from over 140 countries took part in the 2026 race, Australia’s Abbott World Marathon Major.
By carrying one recognisable idea through every channel, Toby’s Estate turned a partnership announcement into a campaign platform that could recruit, entertain and activate, before the first coffee was poured on race day.
Toby’s Estate:
Bridget Taylor, Marketing Manager
Dan Mylonas, Creative Director
Robert Polmear, Creative Designer
Ella Pearce, Digital Marketing Manager
Vee Ketsak, Trade & Promotions Marketer
Alexander Marychurch, Digital Marketing Coordinator
Natalie Boudaher, Marketing Coordinator
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