QMS wins Sydney's multimillion-dollar refresh

It may have taken four years, with two corporate mergers, a court dispute and a global pandemic getting in the way, but the most significant revamp of downtown Sydney's streetscape has begun.

As part of a multimillion-dollar advertising deal, one of the biggest in Australian history, kiosks, bus shelters, public phones and toilets will be pulled from locations across the City of Sydney council area over the next few months and replaced with new furniture.

The 160 panels will be touch screen and deliver news about the city.

But few people know that the company behind the overhaul, led by one of Melbourne's most famous racing identities- John O'Neill - has a story almost as interesting as the fight over the contract itself. The other catch? It will reduce the number of small business kiosks and the installation of old-school public phones across Sydney's CBD.

QMS Media, the Melbourne-born billboard company, owned by private equity firm Quadrant, wasn't the likely winner of Australia's most significant outdoor advertising contract. So now, it's on a mission to show advertisers what is achievable when 26 square kilometres of Sydney is covered with more than 800 digital and static screens.

Sydney city's outdoor advertising contract is widely considered the most lucrative in the country. It is estimated to be worth between $500 to $600 million in advertising over a decade and covers 33 suburbs that make up the most populated city in Australia. For advertisers, it's an ideal location to sell products to commuters. For more than two decades, the contract was held by JCDecaux.

When the contract came up for tender in 2017, it was considered an enormous opportunity for JCDecaux's key rivals. However, two mergers and a protracted legal battle between Telstra and the City of Sydney made it challenging to proceed with finding a new vendor. In addition, the dispute over installing new public phones began to erode the council's relationship with JCDecaux. That is when QMS Media became serious about a bid. Its interest also coincided with takeover talks for the ASX-listed media company by private equity firm Quadrant.

"To even be considered we thought was positive. We put a big team of people on it, thinking how we could change the process. We thought if we could win that footprint and make it digital with a really high spread in all suburbs [that] was something we wanted to do," O'Neill says. "We had a massive crack at it."