Amazon has signed Little Caesars, DraftKings and Mercedes-Benz USA as sponsors for its "Thursday Night Football," which premieres this week.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced its fullest slate of official sponsors, after revealing its first brand deal with Carnival Cruise Line last week. Amazon’s advertising deals show how the company is trying to win over big-name sponsors with marquee positions on pre-game programs and in-game promotions.

Carnival Cruise Line, for instance, has its name on a Wednesday night football show called “The NFL Pile On,” hosted by SNL alum Taran Killam, and will run commercials during games throughout the season. Little Caesars—which is the official pizza of the NFL—is sponsoring the "TNF Tonight" pregame show, which will feature an on-screen QR code that leads viewers to a pizza delivery. DraftKings, meanwhile, will be the sponsor of the gambling odds presented in a segment on the pregame show called “TNF Predictions”.

Amazon also announced that Audible is a "TNF" sponsor. Audible is the audio streaming service owned by Amazon.

Carnival signed up for the full year with Amazon in an upfront ad deal for "TNF," said Jennifer Austin, Carnival's senior director of media strategy. “It piqued our interest,” Austin said in a recent phone interview. “So, we sort of wanted to be there on the ground floor.”

Prime audience

On Thursday, when the Los Angeles Chargers play the Kansas City Chiefs, the game will be the start of the NFL’s largest streaming experiment. Last year, Amazon signed an 11-season deal, at an estimated $1 billion a year, to run TNF exclusively on Prime Video. It was the first time a streaming platform won exclusive NFL rights. The games still run on local broadcasts in the regions where the teams play, but nationally Amazon controls the program.

Amazon has told advertisers that it expects about 12.5 million viewers, which would be about 15% to 20% lower than Fox commanded on "TNF" last year. When the games are broadcast in the local TV markets, they will show the same ads as the Amazon stream, Austin said.

Amazon is guaranteeing the brands that it can deliver on the viewers, and it is dangling data as a sweetener. Amazon hopes its ties to viewers, all of whom are Prime shoppers, too, will give brands more insights into the audience, and it will be able to measure the outcomes of ad campaigns more seamlessly. “There are trackable components that we can use to better measure engagement,” Austin said.

Austin said that Carnival was particularly interested in the type of audience that Amazon could deliver, people 25 to 54 years old. “The streaming demo has dramatically grown to the older ages,” Austin said, and Carnival is hoping to change with the times. “CTV is a big part of our media mix just by the nature of the way consumer consumption has changed,” Austin said.

Carnival will be able to further reach NFL viewers on Amazon by “re-engaging” them on other platforms owned by Amazon, including Twitch, the livestreaming video site.

Little Caesars was the first official NFL sponsor Amazon has announced (it replaced Pizza Hut as the league's official pizza sponsor earlier this year). Brands can have independent exclusive deals with the NFL that make them “official sponsors,” and those sponsors often get first rights on TV and streaming deals. Amazon Web Services also is an official NFL sponsor, which obviously will have some tie-ins with Amazon’s games. AWS will power interactive features in the games, such as giving viewers access to football stats.

There are still some questions about Amazon’s NFL pursuit, especially around audiences. NFL sponsors often are major brands looking for the widest reach, and some brands have held back on signing up until they see how successful Amazon is courting masses of football fans. “Streaming live sports, in general, is still a little unproven,” said a media buyer at a major brand, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The brand is a well-known NFL advertiser, so the buyer could not speak publicly about Amazon’s push for advertisers. “The packages that they’re offering, and the cost of entry,” the buyer said, “might be a little bit out of whack for some of the other offerings in the marketplace.”

If the audience is smaller, and a brand just runs a 30-second commercial on Amazon’s games, the offering is not as enticing, the buyer said. Amazon’s ability to share useful data on consumers also is a question mark.

“We have yet to see how they actually utilize that data,” the media buyer said, “and what they will or will not be able to share based on use privacy.”