Joe Hansen’s Post

Amazon pays the NFL $100 million for exclusive broadcasting rights to its Black Friday game. However, it's really a chess move to steal market share from brick-and-mortar stores and generate online sales. Let me explain 👇 Thanksgiving Day football has always been huge. Last year's games averaged 34.1 million viewers, including 42 million viewers for the Cowboys vs. Commanders — the second most-watched NFL regular season game of all time. 2023 Average Viewership • NBA Christmas Day: 2.85 million • NFL Thanksgiving Day: 34.1 million But the NFL never expanded this tradition to Black Friday because 1) it's a holiday where people leave the house to go shopping and 2) the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 prohibits NFL games on Fridays after 6 pm ET and all day on Saturdays during the fall. Congress initially implemented this rule to protect high school and college football from declining attendance and viewership because of the NFL. But Amazon offered the NFL $100 million for a Black Friday game last year, so the NFL scheduled it for 3 pm ET — three hours before the dark period began. This is a fantastic deal for the NFL — it's $100 million in additional revenue for a game that didn't previously exist — but it's an even better deal for Amazon. Amazon saw more Prime signups during its first Thursday Night Football broadcast than any other 3-hour window in company history, and they sold out of ads for this Black Friday game weeks ago, charging brands between $650,000 to $750,000 this year. However, the real game-changer is Amazon's new ad strategy called "audience-based creative." This tech enables brands to target different audience segments with different ads in the same time slot. For example, last year, Bose showed three different ads using Amazon's ad technology. The first ad featured Joe Burrow and was delivered to non-Prime members, while the other two Bose ads featured different products and were shown only to Prime members based on their Prime search history. And here's the best part... These targeted ads will also be shoppable, meaning viewers can watch the commercial, place the product in their cart with the click of a button, and checkout, all without ever leaving the broadcast. That makes Amazon's broadcast far more valuable than a typical commercial — brands will be able to retarget these customers after the game — and it also gives us a view into how brand advertising could look in the future. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix will only spend more money on live sports, and this type of ad targeting tech could change how brands market forever. Now that's pretty damn cool. WATCH THE FULL BREAKDOWN: https://lnkd.in/en9FA5Wm #sports #sportsbiz #linkedinsports