NFL adds Amazon Black Friday game for next season

The NFL will play a game on Black Friday for the first time next year, and it will be streamed on Amazon in an effort to blend football and holiday sales. The game, which will take place on the day after Thanksgiving, was announced Tuesday as an extension of the 11-season deal the NFL and Amazon reached last year. Amazon hopes this is the “start of a new holiday tradition,” Marie Donoghue, Amazon’s VP of global sports video, said during a press conference. Subscribe to Ad Age Sign up now for the latest industry news and analysis Click here This season, Amazon started showing "Thursday Night Football" on Prime Video, becoming the first major streaming platform to get such a deal. Amazon gets to stream 15 games a season, but it did not score the NFL’s most popular Thursday games of the year, which always run on Thanksgiving. Hans Schroeder, NFL Media’s chief operating officer, said that the Black Friday game would likely become a fixture of the NFL season, going forward. Schroeder said that the NFL and Amazon had been discussing the prospects of a Black Friday game since they first began negotiations over streaming rights. It makes sense for the e-commerce platform to host such a game because Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days in the U.S., kicking off the holiday season. Schroeder acknowledged that Amazon and its platform are “uniquely positioned” to take advantage of that day. Advertisers have been jumping into Amazon’s football streams with marquee sponsorships around pre-game coverage and custom shows around the livestreams. Advertisers also buy traditional 30-second spots during the game. So far, Amazon has stuck mostly to the script of TV advertising, without links that would send people to its shopping hub during the game. But Little Caesars has used QR codes in their commercial spots, which send people to a site for ordering food. DraftKings, Carnival Cruise Lines and Mercedes-Benz are also among the brands advertising on "Thursday Night Football." Amazon has been giving brands extra first-party data that could make their ad campaigns more effective. For instance, Amazon has the ability to retarget commercials to NFL viewers when those viewers watch other ad-supported channels on its platform. Amazon also has retail data that could help marketers understand when ads generate sales. Advertisers also expect that by next year Amazon will have the ability to target ads to specific demographics during the NFL games. Amazon’s ratings are measured by Nielsen, and those have been a little lower than traditional TV when the Thursday games were on Fox. However, Amazon has been promoting the fact that it reaches a younger audience, more-coveted by brands. “The way we’ve programmed is probably also contributing to that younger audience,” Amazon’s Donoghue said on Tuesday. Amazon has alternate streams of the game that play on Twitch, and it is working with popular creator channels like Dude Perfect to handle coverage.

NFL adds Amazon Black Friday game for next season

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