How Amazon is building its own Super Bowl with its Black Friday game

Amazon has generated significant excitement among advertisers for its upcoming Black Friday game, with some media buyers comparing it to a mini Super Bowl. Some brands are even treating it like the Big Game by running new creative specifically produced for the game. Bose, Hasbro, State Farm and DraftKings all have campaigns that will debut during the Black Friday game. The post-Thanksgiving matchup between the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins—a perfect recipe of advanced ad offerings, timed for holiday shoppers and large anticipated reach—created “a scramble” among advertisers, according to one media buyer. The game streams live on Amazon’s Prime Video at 3 p.m. ET on Nov. 24 and will be available to all consumers regardless of whether they’re existing Amazon Prime subscribers or not. (Those without Prime will have to sign up for an Amazon account to watch.) Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Amazon sold out of ad slots for the Black Friday game, the company announced last week. The price for a 30-second spot within the live broadcast is in the range of $600,000, multiple buyers told Ad Age, although one said the price was more comparable to advertising during NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” (A 30-second Super Bowl ad on CBS is said to be in the $7 million range.) “Sunday Night Football” is the most expensive property in fall primetime, according to Ad Age’s TV pricing chart, at an average of $882,079 per unit. The typical cost to advertise during Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” season averages $440,523 for 30 seconds, per Ad Age’s TV pricing chart. A second buyer said demand has overall been high among clients, but it has been hampered by the price hike compared to Amazon’s regular season. More news: Top 10 NFL advertisers this season Overall, the price seems to vary greatly based on how far in advance it was purchased and if the brand is also advertising more extensively during Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” season and surrounding programming. A third buyer said the total package can be as much as a few million dollars. In Amazon’s second year holding exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video, the e-commerce event that the company devised is an effort to transform its NFL access into an advertising and sales channel for Black Friday (Amazon does not stream Thursday games on Thanksgiving, because those annual matchups go to TV networks). The tech company was able to bring in non-traditional football sponsors, such as Hasbro, to jump-start holiday shopping in the Friday football game. “In linear, a lot of [ad inventory] in long-held programming around that week is held and grandfathered in per client for years and years and years,” said the first buyer. Amazon’s Black Friday game got clients excited because “it was a brand new opportunity without a lot of incumbencies that needed to be navigated.” Bose is going into the Black Friday game with a new version of a commercial featuring Cincinnati Bengals Quarterback Joe Burrow, according to Bose Chief Marketing Officer Jim Mollica. There is a twist to the media strategy: “It’s product marketing, but it’s elevated product marketing,” Mollica said, adding there is a “brand piece but it has direct-response components to it.” Also read: Amazon Prime Video pitches new ad tier to brands Ever since it began streaming “Thursday Night Football” last season, Amazon has promised that it could connect its vast shopper data to NFL-style advertising. This season, Amazon started experimenting with what it called “audience-based creative,” and brands could target segments of the viewership with different ads in the same ad slot. Bose is using this feature during the Black Friday game for the first time. There are three versions of Bose’s ads, Mollica said. One features Burrow, which is for viewers who are not Prime subscribers. “They’re not Prime members, they’re football fans, so we have football-related content,” Mollica said. Then there are two commercials for different products targeted to Prime shoppers. Amazon has search data, from people who have already perused its site, which Bose can use to serve a commercial either for headphones or for soundbars. The targeted ads also are shoppable, so a viewer could go from watching the commercial to dropping the product in the cart, and then receive it within days, Mollica said. “We’re treating this as a unique first-time, tentpole moment,” Mollica said. “At the same time, we have the ability to test into variety of media tactics for conversion.” Bose worked with VaynerMedia on the Black Friday campaign. “It’s America’s commerce day and people will be sitting around watching football on a commerce engine,” said Nick Miaritis, chief client officer at VaynerMedia. “It definitely feels like it’s a first-of-its-kind moment given the significant audience and addressability that Amazon has.” Bose can keep the sales pitch going after the game by retargeting ads to viewers of the game through Amazon’s demand-side platform, according to Hugh Scallon, VaynerMedia’s head of video activation. From the commercial, Bose can understand “how many people were exposed, how many went to a commerce experience on Bose or Amazon, and understand the sales rate,” Scallon said. Football marketing news Tracking Super Bowl, NFL and college brand moves Read more here Amazon released more details about plans for the Black Friday game yesterday, and named more of the brands participating, including Nintendo, TCL, Dyson and Lego. Amazon’s Danielle Carney, head of NFL ad sales, said that the Amazon team sold brands on creating custom commercials just for this game, and that there will be twice as many “interactive” ads as during a typical Thursday game on Amazon. This means people watching can use their remotes to take actions on the commercials, such as adding a toy to their Amazon shopping cart without leaving the game. “For advertisers, it’s the first time to really kick off the holiday shopping season on Black Friday with that type of large-scale audience,” Carney told Ad Age. The second buyer said the game is anticipated to draw an audience of about 20 million, but that the estimate is “pretty low when you think that you don’t need to have Amazon Prime to watch this—it’s going to be free to everyone—so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw well above 20 million folks watch this thing given a lot of people are off from work and the nature of the holiday.” What’s different for this game than the typical Amazon football presentations, is the level of participation of consumer goods brands, Carney said, including Hasbro, Bose and Columbia Sportswear. Brands are trying to lead football viewers from commercial to holiday sales, and Carney said Amazon has data showing that it can take holiday shoppers down that path. Amazon’s first-party data showed that reaching viewers with a commercial on “Thursday Night Football,” as the first impression, and then hitting that consumer with a more direct-response style ad—down funnel—afterward, increases views of a brand’s product detail page on Amazon by 100%, Carney said. Purchase rates are also higher for brands that start with campaigns that launch on “Thursday Night Football,” according to Carney, improving sales goals on certain campaigns by 86%, compared to campaigns that didn’t start on Amazon’s football streams. “Columbia Sportswear or Hasbro, that haven’t traditionally purchased the NFL, those are great examples, [of brands] partnering with us not just for Black Friday but outside Black Friday, as well,” Carney said, saying brands would keep their campaigns rolling beyond the game, with different ad types, and retargeting shoppers across Amazon. “We’re working with nontraditional ads, building out custom creative that will be rolled in with talent for that game.” Check out the latest marketing news here The first and second buyers said most of their clients had developed creative specifically for the game, which the second buyer said is merely the “base level” of opportunity Amazon’s broadcast presents. While many of those advertisers have upped the ante with shoppable capabilities built into their ads, the most advanced are utilizing Amazon’s data across its streaming, music, connected TV device and retail ecosystem to develop numerous variations of creative that can be served to different audience targets within the same ad unit. The targeting was made available for the first time this year but could be tested even more widely during the Black Friday game. Amazon’s deep data offerings are what make packaging Black Friday with larger buys worth the investment, according to the second buyer, and the opportunity will only grow as the tech company looks to launch advertising in Prime Video originals next year. The Black Friday game is a unique moment in streaming TV and advertising. The NFL has only run a slate of games on Thanksgiving, and then the shopping season starts in earnest Friday. Amazon is hosting this football game on all its websites and streaming properties, available to non-Prime Video members, too, giving it as wide a reach as possible. And Amazon has its e-commerce site that is tightly integrated with its connected TV strategy. Amazon is trying to use its data on consumer, football content rights and commerce to hook brands. “I don’t think about it as just buying the spot—I’m buying the audience for the full season,” said the second buyer. After an advertiser runs its first “Thursday Night Football” spot, it begins developing a retargetable audience based on who watched, the buyer said, and the audience grows with “every subsequent spot throughout the year, so for some of our advertisers that’s been compounding and building itself.” The Black Friday game offers the opportunity to expand that audience segment by the tens of millions. According to the buyer, the data offering makes Amazon’s Black Friday game far more valuable than other holiday sports inventory that may be priced lower. Similar to the Super Bowl, the second buyer foresees two or three spots from Amazon’s Black Friday game breaking out from the “promo soup” that “drive a lot of traffic and get people to transact” in substantial numbers. Should numerous success stories emerge, future iterations of the Black Friday game could ascend to getting the war room treatment from brands typically reserved for February’s Big Game. A fourth buyer, however, said comparisons to the Super Bowl may be overblown, despite the unique offering from Amazon. Amazon is “really thinking about meaningful connections in the game and rewarding fans for tuning in by getting exclusive deals,” Carney said. “We are partnering really closely with brands on delivering exclusive deals and being thoughtful about those placements, and how it leads throughout the game, and the deals [will be] changing throughout.”

How Amazon is building its own Super Bowl with its Black Friday game

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