Amazon’s Prime Video has been working on its holiday ad game.
After debuting an NFL game on “Black Friday” in 2023, the streaming giant plans to add NBA games to the mix, bolstering its efforts to woo some of the millions Madison Avenue typically spends in the run-up to the end-of-year holidays.
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“We are looking to really establish Black Friday as a new franchise that’s incredibly valuable for the leagues and for fans,” says Jay Marine, global head of sports for Amazon Prime Video, during an interview. “The NBA is going to roll out right after our Black Friday football game. Black Friday will really become a sports event that’s on Amazon all throughout the day.”
The one-two punch of featuring two different major-league sports on the day after Thanksgiving sets Amazon up to be a bigger player in the fourth quarter of the year, a stretch of calendar that can bring in a significant chunk of ad dollars for most major media outlets. Amazon will work to connect its Black Friday sports coverage with a Christmas Night NFL game it gets as part of its “Thursday Night Football” package.
Amazon, which will present its next programming lineup at a showcase Monday night, is just one of several media conglomerates hoping to use sports to win more ad dollars at a tricky time for Madison Avenue. Advertisers still covet large audiences that watch particular shows all at once, rather than beaming ads in piecemeal fashion to individuals who choose to stream their favorite programs at moments of their own choosing. And yet, the latter dynamic is becoming more prevalent, forcing media companies to dig deeper into sports and live spectacles such as award shows.
“Sports is really the last thing left that can deliver a large-scale audience all at once, whjich is incredibly valuable,’ says Marine.
Amazon hopes a widening sports portfolio will make it more relevant to advertisers throughout the year. Amazon’s NBA rights kick in later this year, part of a new 11-year deal the basketball league struck that will split its games into three different packages spread across Amazon’s Prime Video, NBCUniversal’s NBC and Peacock and Disney’s ABC and ESPN.
“I would say that ‘Thursday Night Football’ helped establish us” with advertisers, says Marine of Amazon’s NFL package, which it won sole control over in 2022. “One thing they wanted is more.” In addition to the new NBA package, Amazon also holds rights to some NASCAR races, some WNBA games and some NWSL matches.
The broader portfolio gives advertisers a way to stick with Prime Video “12 months a year.”
He suggests Amazon will use many of the concepts that bolstered “Thursday Night Football” with the NBA. Viewers will be able to choose to see different on-screen graphics packages that pair statistics with game movement. The company is still considering whether to present so-called “alterna-casts” with NBA games, Marine says. Its “Thursday Night Football” has been paired with simultaneous broadcasts of the game with the improv group Dude Perfect or the team of Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer, the first all-female broadcasting team tied to the NFL.
There is hope that Amazon’s broader sports portfolio will draw greater attention, says Marine, particularly as corporations try to understand where the economy is headed amid threats of new tariffs by the Trump administration. “In times of economic uncertainty, advertisers will move to where they can get the scale they need,” says the executive.
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