Amazon Prime Video is betting that a stacked lineup of sports can help it turbocharge its fast-growing advertising business.
The tech giant’s video streaming service already has NFL Thursday Night Football, which averaged 13.2 million viewers last season, and it has WNBA and NWSL games, giving it a lineup of women’s sports. This year it will add NASCAR Cup Series and, in the fall, the NBA, giving it a year-round presence, and the ability to give advertisers and sponsors the ability to spend big 12 months out of the year.
“We’re really excited about elevating and being a new voice inside the NBA, and driving new audiences that are really valuable to our customers,” says Danielle Carney, the head of live sports and video sales for Amazon Ads. “When we think about how we start to partner with customers, we’re thinking about this from a multi-sport perspective. We’re able to connect the dots for them across the calendar now, through sponsorship and brand innovations that we’re doing.”
Carney also notes that Amazon will also be able to leverage its entertainment programming, giving marketers a true one-stop shop.
“That was a big launch for us last year with Prime Video Ads, sponsorship has become bigger and bigger of an importance, and the way we’re working to deliver one thematic across sports and entertainment, and taking these insights is really exciting,” she says. “So we have advertisers leaning in. I think they’re listening, and we’re listening back, it’s really important to understand their brands and then share the insights we have.”
One big shift from Thursday Night Football will be the creation of Amazon’s first studio show, which will serve as the home for its NBA coverage. “It really is our first studio for sports,” Carney says.
The advantage of doing something new is that you don’t have to be beholden to the way things were done previously, and Amazon intends to take those ethos and apply it to the new studio programming. In other words, the studio shows will be created with brand sponsorships in mind.
“If you’ve watched Thursday Night Football, part of our innovation was being in every game in every city, and taking a production like that on the road,” Carney says. “I think it’s created these really unique moments for fans through our Allstate Nightcap that you see and it created these unique moments, but now we have the opportunity as Amazon to build a state of the art studio where our early conversations with partners around how do we integrate them natively into it and build from the ground up with them.”
That will include in-studio and virtual placements, in-game placements, and sponsorship of highlights, replays and other event-driven opportunities.
And Amazon says those integrations will be measured, with a first-party measurement product that it says can measure integrations like 30-second spots.
“We’ve been able to capture all of the first party insights that you would capture on audiences with a 30 second creative,” Carney says. “Did someone see your sponsorship element, your feature, and did they see your ad? Did they only see one? What did they do after? Did they click to purchase through? Did it drive them into a different customer path? Sponsorship really matters, particularly the impact it’s having.”
As with Thursday Night Football, Amazon is also planning to go big on interactive spots and shoppable ads, letting marketers allow viewers to click right through to buy their product on Amazon. Carney defines it as a “core value prop” for the company.
“It’s about the trillions of signals and measured outcomes that we can provide our advertisers, and it really differentiates ourself,” she says. “So when we think about taking the scale of live sports and being able to use those signals on that scale, it is definitely a point of distinction for us at Amazon.
Then taking the best content you can have, premium sports, taking the distribution points we have, those trillions of signals, and connecting it directly to commerce just just takes on a whole different conversation with our partners,” she adds.
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