They say there are no new ideas left in sports media. But the more I think about it, the more I believe Amazon Prime Video’s strategy to transform Black Friday into an annual sports holiday for the NFL and NBA is a stroke of genius.
On Nov. 29, Prime and the NFL will stream its second straight Black Friday football game. Prime has a great matchup, too: the Super Bowl champion Chiefs hosting the Raiders. And that’s not all. As part of Prime’s 11-year, $20 billion deal to show NBA games starting in the 2025–2026 season, the streamer will also stream a Black Friday NBA game in 2025—effectively creating an NFL/NBA doubleheader on the year’s biggest shopping day.
Jay Marine, head of Prime Video Sports, is playing chess, not checkers. For decades, the shopping bonanza that is Black Friday lay fallow as a potential sports day while the NFL and NBA pulled record TV audiences on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. It was ripe for the picking. But outside of relatively low-profile college football and basketball games, nobody capitalized until the retail-focused Prime pounced last year.
Yes, Prime’s first Black Friday game between the Jets and Dolphins on Nov. 24 averaged a disappointing 9.61 million viewers. But I expect that number to rise this season, given the Chiefs are dethroning the Cowboys as the NFL’s No. 1 TV draw.
If Prime can begin pulling anywhere near the viewership of the NFL’s annual Thanksgiving tripleheader, NFL media czar Brian Rolapp will pop the champagne corks. Last year’s Cowboys-Commanders game on Thanksgiving averaged an eye-popping 42 million viewers, making it the most-watched regular-season game of the year.
Meanwhile, ABC/ESPN’s five-game slate of Christmas Day NBA games averaged 4.3 million viewers last year. I can see an NBA Black Friday game pulling more. Due to the NFL’s antitrust exemption preventing it from Friday Night games during this part of the calendar, the football game will stream at 3 p.m. ET. As Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk noted: “That gives the rest of the evening for one or two NBA games — with the NFL handing a potentially massive audience to the basketball game(s).”
You can be sure Jeff Bezos and the executives at Amazon are already thinking about streaming the Super Bowl or NBA Finals someday. Starting in 2025, these Black Friday NFL/NBA doubleheaders should enable Prime to achieve several objectives. They’ll solidify Prime’s claim to hosting the two leagues’ tentpole events. Just as importantly, they’ll enable the e-commerce giant to attack brick-and-mortar competitors like Walmart on their biggest sales day of the year. Prime’s pitch practically sells itself: Why battle the mobs at your local mall when you can shop from home—while watching NFL and NBA games?
Finally, they’ll allow Prime to further explore the lucrative opportunity of so-called “shoppable TV.” Since the 1990s, the Holy Grail of Madison Avenue has been inducing TV viewers to shop while watching TV. Back then, the marketers’ dream was to “sell Jennifer Aniston’s sweater” to viewers watching NBC’s Friends. But every time the networks tried it, it flopped.
The Amazon Advantage
But today’s sports viewers are more comfortable with online shopping. Prime has already sold out its commercial inventory, with 40% of advertisers new from last year’s game. The streamer is working closely with marketers to create “shoppable ads.” Point your device at the screen and you’ll go directly to special offer deals at Amazon as well as custom-brand landing pages. Forget Jennifer’s Aniston sweater. This time around, the goal will be to hawk $100 Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes jerseys to millions of Swifties watching the Chiefs game—as well as to tired parents looking to shop from their living room.
“Completing your holiday shopping while enjoying your favorite sports and indulging in Thanksgiving leftovers is as brilliant as it gets. The genius of the deal is that it leverages NFL and NBA games as a platform for Black Friday discounts, which is both innovative and fan-friendly. It’s a sponsor’s dream to reach fans with enticing deals they can purchase directly from their phones while watching an NFL or NBA game,” says media consultant Jim Williams.
The NFL and NBA will likely get their cut of merchandise sales generated during Black Friday games. Like the rest of the media industry, sports leagues have struggled to blend sports and e-commerce. But Amazon, with a staggering $575 billion in revenue during fiscal 2023, has the cheat code when it comes to retail. One reason why the NFL and NBA are partnering with the tech giant is they get a direct pipeline into Prime’s 200 million global subscribers. So will the NFL’s 42 corporate sponsors if they advertise on Black Friday.
“Good opportunity for advertisers and brands to do special product drops,” T.K. Gore, head of sports business development at Kiswe, noted.
Prime’s not the only sports media company thinking about shoppable TV. On Thursday, The CW announced it will invite college football fans to buy game-day gear and other items while watching ACC college football telecasts. The CW’s partnership with Shopsense AI will kick off with Virginia Tech at Syracuse on Nov. 2.
As Amazon said during its third-quarter earnings announcement Thursday: “There’s so much more coming, from tens of millions of deals, to our NFL Black Friday game and Election Day coverage with Brian Williams on Prime Video, to over 100 new cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities that we’ll share at AWS re:Invent the week after Thanksgiving.”
Somewhere, Rachel from Friends is smiling.
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