Despite some ratings hiccups in the first two weeks, including a delay in delivering audience numbers after the first game, advertisers said Amazon’s football streaming experiment is mostly living up to its promise.

The platform is delivering on ratings, advertisers said, even if the average audience is smaller than “Thursday Night Football” on Fox last year. On average, ratings from the first two weeks were down 22% compared to what Fox drew last year, according to a new report from Omnicom Media Group’s Optimum Sports agency. But the agency, and other in-game advertisers, said that ratings are in-line with Amazon’s forecast and that the streaming audience is younger and wealthier than those watching on traditional TV.

Jeremy Carey, chief investment officer at Optimum Sports, said that the agency made a big investment on Amazon’s NFL games this season, including representing two of the most prominent brands, DraftKings and Mercedes-Benz. “We were out there pushing this thing really hard from the get-go,” Carey said, adding that the Amazon bet was “probably double any other holding company out there, in terms of the commitments that we made.”

Optimum Sports is looking at more than just the Nielsen-certified ratings to measure the success of the program. Amazon's early games drew a higher number of 18-to-49-year-olds—8% more than Fox averaged last year.

Amazon bought the rights to stream 15 “Thursday Night Football” games over the next 11 seasons at an estimated $1 billion a year. The overall audience was always expected to be lower than on broadcast TV.

There is “value beyond traditional measurement,” Carey said. “Merging live sports with the largest e-commerce platform in the U.S., there is no better pathway for us toward understanding how our marketing directly attributes to sales.”

Higher-income viewers

The median household income of Amazon NFL viewers was $101,900, according to Optimum Sports, which is $13,000 more than households watching NFL on linear TV this season. Also, 1.8 million viewers that streamed Amazon games have not watched NFL outside of Prime this year.

One of Amazon’s benefits is that it can track viewers to serve them ads outside of games, retargeting them. Amazon also has first-party data that tracks sales happening in its online store. Carey said that Amazon would also eventually offer targeted ads inside the NFL streams, so different audiences could receive different creative, which is not an option on broadcast TV.

Nielsen, of course, is the standard TV ratings provider, but Amazon augments the data with its internal metrics. Nielsen reported 13 million viewers for the first Thursday game between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs, while Amazon said there were 15.3 million viewers. The audience dropped the following week, when the Pittsburgh Steelers played the Cleveland Browns, drawing 11 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Amazon’s internal calculation estimated an average audience of 13.6 million for that Sept. 22 game.

Advertisers pay based on the Nielsen numbers, and so far there have been no needs for “make-goods,” where Amazon would have to give brands more inventory to fill their orders, according to advertisers.

'Tremendous increase in interest'

“Amazon is doing absolutely fine in terms of what we expected them to do,” said another sports media buyer, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The advertisers are happy, but it is unclear how many advertisers Amazon has locked into deals, this ad executive said. Amazon has sold premium sponsorships, like ones with Little Caesars and Carnival Cruise Lines, where the brands get naming rights on pre-game programming. Amazon still has a post-game sponsorship available, the executive said.

“Amazon has been all over us, looking for any opportunity, for any client, working with agencies,” the executive said. “Amazon is looking for any avenue to make a sale.”

The sports media buyer said that Amazon is not banking on traditional commercial breaks to recoup its $1 billion yearly investment in NFL. Amazon is looking to grow Prime subscriptions, increase viewership across its digital video platform, and sell brand deals that use its whole platform to target ads and drive sales. The whole NFL offering will only grow more sophisticated, the buyer said. “What Amazon is really looking at is innovation in seasons two through 11,” the buyer said.

Amazon shared some stats it tracked since the season started, such as online search interest in products in the commercials. Viewers were 4.6 times more likely to search for auto brands that appeared on Amazon's “Thursday Night Football” compared to games on TV, and were 3.2 times more likely to search for the gambling brands in ads on its platform compared to those airing on TV, according to Amazon.

“In the past two weeks we’ve seen a tremendous increase in interest and new partners are coming on board,” said Danielle Carney, Amazon’s head of NFL ad sales, in an email. “This season of TNF is going to be a catalyst for brands to push deeper into the future of live sports streaming. The brands that collaborate with us and dive into the opportunities of our first-party audiences will find success.”

Amazon also said that it was seeing interest from more potential advertisers as the season goes on. Amazon’s third game of the season, the Miami Dolphins at the Cincinnati Bengals, was played Thursday and ratings for that game are expected to come out Monday.