Amazon’s Black Friday NFL game sells out of ad inventory

Amazon Prime Video has sold out of ad inventory for its second Black Friday NFL game, according to three sources with knowledge of negotiations. Media buyers said Black Friday inventory reached sellout as of early July, with one buyer saying clients were “lucky to secure a spot because, boy, they sold quickly.” The 2024 game’s sellout comes months before Amazon finalized inventory for its inaugural Black Friday Game game. Last year's game sold out in early November, two weeks before kickoff. Deals for Black Friday inventory in 2023 could still be had in the week leading up to kickoff, a second buyer said. “Black Friday is the game you want to have,” said a third media buyer, noting that it’s particularly appealing to retail and consumer packaged-goods clients looking to boost sales during the shopping holiday. A 30-second unit in Amazon’s Black Friday game costs between $650,000 to $750,000 on average, with variation higher or lower based on an advertisers’ broader deal with Amazon, according to three buyers. See all of the 2024 Small Agency award winners here “We continue to see outsized demand from advertisers for TNF inventory and the Black Friday game,” said an Amazon spokesperson. “We are working with advertisers on the few remaining exclusive shoppable Black Friday retail integration deals that will run in game,” which allow brands to spotlight special discounts for Black Friday game viewers. The speed at which Amazon sold this year’s Black Friday inventory also points to the growing divide between sports and the rest of TV inventory in the upfront marketplace. As more advertisers shift spending away from the upfront model in favor of short-term buying year-round, sports remains an exception, commanding demand for long-term commitments as advertisers seek increasingly rare aggregated audiences in TV. “We’ve got clients that are just not upfront-oriented,” said the first buyer. “Between streaming and linear, there are plenty of impressions to be had, but there are certain pockets—college football and NFL are two of them—that if you really want to have specific matchups and things like that, you have to move early.” Also read: Have Super Bowl ad prices peaked? Amazon’s sellout for the Black Friday game comes despite lackluster ratings in its inaugural outing last year; 2023’s Black Friday game drew 9.61 million viewers, per Nielsen, about half of what some media buyers anticipated. Yet multiple media buyers said clients were eager to invest in this year’s game due to the data and tech capabilities, timing and matchup, which features the Super Bowl champion Chiefs and the Raiders. (Last year’s game featured the Dolphins and Jets, who entered the game mostly out of playoff contention and without star quarterback Aaron Rodgers.) For this year’s game, Amazon anticipates an audience of 14 million, said the first buyer, who added that pricing for the special-event game comes at generally a 25% increase over regular “Thursday Night Football” unit costs. The terms of the ad deals also vary across advertisers. The first buyer said some clients saw a minimum commitment of $3 million across “Thursday Night Football” and Amazon’s sports franchises, which also include the WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League, in order to access Black Friday game inventory. The second buyer said that some clients who asked about one-off units in the Black Friday game saw unit prices in the range of $1 million. These numbers are slightly higher than last year’s prices. Ad units in the 2023 Black Friday game cost $600,000 on average, with a $1.5 million commitment to other Amazon inventory. Amazon will continue to have a larger sports portfolio to leverage in dealmaking as it adds broadcasts of NASCAR starting in May 2025 and the NBA starting in the 2025-26. Why Amazon’s Black Friday game appeals to advertisers Amazon’s Black Friday game “is the best trifecta of all the things clients want coming together—the best timeframe; a retailer [Amazon] that knows a ton about their customers and how to sell products to them; and all that data for targeting,” said the third buyer. “All of those things together—I don’t think you have to pitch much more than that.” Amazon’s Black Friday game offers data-rich capabilities for advertisers to target audiences based on their shopping history in the platform, such as serving different versions of creative in one slot based on who’s watching. Last year, multiple brands created unique campaigns for the game. Bose, for instance, aired three different ads in one spot based on the viewer. The game also enhances a brand’s retargeting data with Amazon viewers, allowing advertisers to reach consumers who may have interacted with a QR code or shoppable banner during the game at a later time. Viewers of last year’s Black Friday game were 78% more likely to search for brands or products advertised than viewers of ads on competitive NFL Thanksgiving games (CBS, NBC and Fox aired NFL games on Thanksgiving day, averaging 34.1 million viewers across them), and 40% more likely to search for brands or products advertised than viewers of ads on competitive NFL networks, EDO reported last year. These capabilities are also possible during Amazon’s regular “Thursday Night Football” season, but the first buyer said the Black Friday game is a critical time when the number of consumers actively seeking out products for holiday shopping is higher than normal. That contrasts with Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL game, which occur after the core retail marketing season has ended. Those two games will also compete with the more-established NBA games on the holiday, which has contributed to the streamers’ struggles selling its NFL packages. But the timing also means the Black Friday game’s appeal to advertisers is more specific than the rest of the season. The first buyer said that a fraction of their clients advertising in Amazon’s regular “Thursday Night Football” season are also in the Black Friday game because it’s more crowded with deal-based marketing that could drown out non-retail marketers. “It’s almost like the Super Bowl in the sense that you don’t just buy it to buy it,” added the second buyer. “You buy it because you have a message to get across, a product or a brand to launch, and you want to do it to a large-scale, diverse audience. If you have the creative and message to tell, it’s certainly worth the investment.” The media buyer also expressed enthusiasm for the matchup between the Raiders and Chiefs. “Matchups in sports in general are super important—they drive viewership and [ad] investment,” said the buyer. “This is a big year for [Amazon]. If they can show that last year was an anomaly, it really was impacted by Aaron Rogers’ injury, and this year can perform well compared to last year, that’ll really build the credibility of it and give them leverage moving forward as well.”

Amazon’s Black Friday NFL game sells out of ad inventory

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