How Amazon is Using Football To Generate Black Friday Sales
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Friends,
Football on Thanksgiving Day is a tradition as old as time. It started with college football in 1876 — these annual games actually helped Thanksgiving become a more popular holiday! — and the NFL started its own tradition with six games in 1920.
The Detroit Lions are credited with pioneering the tradition, selling 26,000 tickets two weeks before their sold-out game at University of Detroit Stadium on Thanksgiving Day in 1934. And the Dallas Cowboys made it even bigger, packing more than 80,000 fans in the Cotton Bowl for the Thanksgiving Day game in 1966.
Both of these teams (the Lions and Cowboys) are now guaranteed a game every Thanksgiving, and the NFL even added a third Thanksgiving game in 2006.
2023 NFL Thanksgiving Day Schedule
Packers at Lions - 12:30 pm ET on CBS
Commanders at Cowboys - 4:30 pm ET on FOX
49ers at Seahawks - 8:20 pm ET on NBC
Thanksgiving Day games are super popular, too. Last year, for instance, the NFL’s three Thanksgiving Day games averaged 33.5 million viewers, and the matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants drew 42 million viewers, making it the most-watched NFL regular season game of all time.
For context, five NBA Christmas Day games last year averaged 4.27 million viewers, and 33.5 million viewers on Thanksgiving Day is much more in line with what the NFL would expect for conference championship games than the regular season.
2022 Average Viewership Per Event
NBA Christmas Day: 4.27 million viewers
NFL Thanksgiving Day: 33.5 million viewers
AFC Championship: 47.8 million viewers
NFC Championship: 50.2 million viewers
But now the NFL is taking it a step further by adding its first-ever Black Friday game.
Amazon is paying $100 million for exclusive streaming rights to the NFL’s first-ever Black Friday game — a matchup between the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets.
The game will kick off at 3 pm ET on Amazon. Local broadcast stations in both home markets will also play the game, similar to Thursday Night Football. Everyone will be able to watch it, whether you have an Amazon Prime account or not. And there are plenty of entertainment options, including an alternate stream hosted by Dude Perfect and an Amazon Music Live event with Garth Brooks streaming on Prime right after the game.
But entertainment aside, this isn’t going to be your typical football broadcast.
The joke is that Amazon paid $100 million to stop people from going to the store on Black Friday and will instead try to get everyone to buy things on Amazon Prime. But that’s not really a joke because Amazon has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Amazon is treating this game like a mini Super Bowl, charging advertisers 2x more than their average TNF rate — $880,000 for a 30-second spot vs. the average $440,000 rate. Brands like Bose, State Farm, and DraftKings will be debuting entirely new advertising campaigns that were specifically designed for this game, and Amazon will leverage its new ad strategy called “audience-based creative,” enabling brands to target different audience segments with different ads in the same time slot.
For example, Ad Age reports that Bose will show three different ads using Amazon's audience-based creative. The first ad features Joe Burrow and will be delivered to non-Prime members, while the other two Bose ads will feature different products and be shown only to Prime members based on their Amazon Prime search data.
But here’s the best part: These targeted ads will also be shoppable, meaning viewers can watch the commercial and then directly place the product in their cart to purchase.
These ads will run throughout the entire game, including pregame and postgame shows. Viewers can buy products from their cart without even leaving the game, and brands can retarget ads to Black Friday viewers after the game via Amazon’s demand-side platform.
“I don’t think about it as just buying the spot—I’m buying the audience for the full season,” a buyer told Ad Age.
This not only makes advertising spots on Amazon’s broadcast far more valuable than a typical commercial, but it’s a peek into how brand advertising could look in the future as streaming companies continue to buy up live sports rights (think NFL and NBA).
It’s also cool to see the NFL continue to innovate from a broadcasting perspective.
The dynamic ads on Amazon are unique. But many people never considered the NFL would even be able to do a Black Friday game because of the Sports Broadcasting Act.
For those that aren’t familiar, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 was implemented to provide NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL teams with an antitrust exemption that allows them to merge their teams’ broadcasting rights together without fear of being sued under antitrust law — aka the NFL can package up its rights for CBS, Fox, and others.
But given that large NFL television contracts could harm high school and college football viewership and attendance, Congress included specific language that banned NFL games from occurring on Fridays after 6 pm EST or Saturdays in the fall.
This is why the NFL created Monday Night Football (and eventually Thursday Night Football). And it’s one of the reasons why we have never had a Black Friday game.
But the NFL clearly isn’t worried about that anymore. Commissioner Roger Goodell and his partners have done a better job than anyone maximizing broadcasting rights by splitting up games — Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Peacock’s exclusive playoff game, etc. — and starting a Black Friday game at 3 pm EST so you can get an additional $100 million from Amazon is just another example of the league maximizing its value.
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