What do you give to someone who already has everything? Amazon delivered several gifts to the National Football League as its streaming Black Friday game appeared to firmly establish a new football franchise and a new venue for shopping at the beginning of the holiday season.
The NFL helped Amazon by scheduling the Chiefs for the day after Thanksgiving. Not only are the Chiefs emerging as the league’s most-watch team, partly because of a devoted Taylor Swift army tuning in for glimpses of their idol as Swift watches her boyfriend Travis Kelce catch passes from Patric Mahomes. The Chiefs are also playing close games, keeping viewers tuned in to see how Kansas will pull off its weekly last-second victory.
Amazon has also done its part. In its years carrying the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s technical expertise has proved that streaming games need not be interrupted by buffering delays and other hitches (Has Netflix, which will stream two NFL games on Christmas Day, reached out to Amazon for tips?) For another thing, Amazon has put together a top-notch broadcast team, with Kirk Herbstreitand Al Michaels in the booth and Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzgerald, Tony Gonzalez, Richard Sherman and Andrew Whitworth in the studio.
Already, football fans expect to see a game on Black Friday and will be looking forward to watching year after year, just the do while stuffing themselves with turduckens on Thanksgiving. Viewership was up 41% to 13.5 million, according to Nielsen. Next year, sports fans will have even more to stay home to watch on Black Friday because following football Amazon plans to stream an NBA game as part of a new contract with the league that starts next season.
Moreover, Amazon is good at selling things, and it’s brought this knowhow to the NFL and sponsors.
According to EDO, which measures the effectiveness of ad campaigns, commercials during Prime Video’s Black Friday game were 6% more effective than the average primetime NFL ad, 51% more effective than ads that aired in Thanksgiving Day NFL games. In addition, they were 74% more effective than the average primetime commercial in primetime broadcast or cable content.
Because they are so effective, Black Friday commercials could be a bargain at the $650,000 to $750,000 advertisers paid for each 30 second spot..
On top of that 30% more Black Friday advertisers used interactive and shoppable ad formats during the game.
Among the advertisers using interacitve ads was Tostitos. Viwers chould push a button and chips would be added to their Amazon cart. Pressing a button during a State Farm would get you a quote for insurance. Lego, Arby’s, Snyders, Microsoft Surface, Polo, Coca-Cola, Solo Stove also used Amazon’s bells and whistles.
Even the advertisers who didn’t use interactive commercials promoted special black Friday offers and used football related creative with players from the game and announcers from the Amazon Prime Video booth.
“The Black Friday game is changing consumer behaviors for both fans and advertisers as a new sports holiday on one of the biggest shopping days,” said Danielle Carney, Head of Live Sports and Video Sales for Amazon Ads, said in a statement. “Prime Video’s leaned-in audience came ready to engage with our Black Friday advertisers through clicks, scans, and search which resulted in our highest customer engagement on record.”
For decades, the TV business has drooled over the prospect of being able to sell Friends viewers the weather Jennifer Aniston was wearing on the show through some sort of home-shopping gizmo.. Over the years, home shopping technologies have come and gone.
If anyone can get people to skip stores, even on Black Friday, it’s Amazon. And now, Amazon is using the power of the NFL to add fuel to shopping on TV by putting interactive ads in forefront om of more viewers than ever.
Michael Bologna, an interactive ad pioneer who is now chief accelerator at Brightline, watched the Black Friday game and thought it was great.
“It was very clear during that program that the ads were interactive, that there was something different,” Bologna told Barrett Media. “Whenever you see any type of new format in a tentpole event, it’s always going to resonate better.”
Bologna said that with Amazon’s push, “it gave consumers a chance to see the power of interactivity. Those consumers are also advertisers, so I thought it was good for the business and good for the industry.”
It’s not clear whether or not viewers are more or less likely to interact with an ad while watching sports compared to other types of programming.
“People always say that sports is great for anything new, but they really don’t mean sports is great for anything new,” Bologna said. “They mean scale is great for something new, and sports brings scale. Sports brings a large audience and any time you’re trying to introduce a new type of format in the media business, you want as many people to see it as possible.”
Bologna warns that there are still obstacles to widespread adoption of ads by the TV industry. The formats need to be standardized, so they can make one ad that can appear on every platform. There also needs to be transparency about whose watching and what they bought. He warns that some platforms are reluctant to share data.
But the technology will inevitably evolve.
“Amazon is just starting the scratch the surface of that they could potentially do, Bologna said. “They own the e-commerce back end and they own the subscriber on Prime, so merging the two of them is a piece of cake.” He added that now that it owns TV set maker Vizio, Walmart could ramp up interactivity. And Brightline has its own method for working with streamers who want interactivity in their ads.
“We’ll see just how much interactive functionality the average viewer has an appetite for,” Bologna said.
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