Amazon Wants to Turbocharge Its Sports Advertising Business, Too

Alex Weprin
·4 min read

2024 will be the year of advertising for Amazon and its Prime Video division.

Later this month the tech giant will flip a switch and turn on ads for hundred of millions of Prime Video users (giving them the option of paying an extra $3 per month to remove them). But as excited as the ad industry is for Prime Video’s entertainment programming to get adds, Amazon’s sports programming has been in the ad business for years.

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And it intends to make it even bigger.

“What’s amazing about Prime Video ads is that we have the ability to take this global reach and scale and premium content like live sports and Prime Video originals and pair that with performance and measurement capabilities that we have uniquely to us here at Amazon,” says Danielle Carney, who leads Amazon’s sports advertising business.

And sports are increasingly at the center of its focus, led by NFL Thursday Night Football, which Carney notes saw its viewership rise by 24 percent compared to the prior season. She also noted that in the last season over 50 percent of its TNF advertisers were new to the game package, and 20 percent were new to the NFL.

“What was great about that total audience growth was that we were still able to keep the uniqueness of our audience, still seven years younger, incremental to other NFL audiences and really just high engagement that we saw, versus some other NFL partners,” Carney said.

Amazon intends to expand its sports advertising business through more “interactive video ads” which allow for viewers to shop for an item with just a click (a more advanced form of buying than an on-screen QR code) and through “audience based creative” which leverages targeting data to deliver more precise marketing messages.

Going forward, the company intends to expand its interactive video ads beyond its own Fire TV platform and will expand segmenting capabilities for it audience based creative product.

Carney specifically laid out how the more advanced ad tech worked on Amazon’s inaugural Black Friday game between the Dolphins and Jets.

“We saw Black Friday overall had over 250 percent increase in engagement with interactivity that day, which shouldn’t be surprising, right? It’s the biggest holiday shopping day of the year and us being Amazon and having that direct connection from content to commerce,” Carney says. “But we saw that interactivity really work, what we saw that was interesting was QR codes that day drove over 300 percent interactivity and engagement versus a typical week with QR codes, and Interactive Video Ads continue to outperform QR codes.

“I think the other interesting thing we saw about Black Friday was 31 percent of our Black Friday audience didn’t watch any of the other Thanksgiving games,” she added.

But if the last year was about the NFL, the future is about a whole lot more. Amazon will add live NASCAR races in 2025, and this year will launch live National Womens Soccer League (NWSL) games, joining its WNBA coverage in the womens sports space.

“There’s such a surge in female sports and we are really focused on that with NWSL,” Carney says, adding that the company wants to reimagine its sponsorship deals as it expands its sports offerings. “We want to be able to kind of think about sponsorship in the same way we think about a 30 second ad, so we want to be able to deliver the same insights and parity that we can deliver for an ad for sponsorships for our customers and our advertisers.”

“We really want to hear from our partners and understand how can we take some of that performance and measurement capabilities we have here at Amazon that we deliver for you on any of your ad buys, and bring that to sponsorship?” she adds. “And I think we’re gonna get a lot of excitement around that because especially in sports, you know, sponsorship plays a really big role.”

It’s a pitch that has the company betting that it can dramatically grow its ad business, in sports, entertainment and beyond.

“I think this full funnel approach with a single partner like Amazon and our ability to drive right through to commerce is what’s creating the most excitement,” Carney says. “I mean, we have this unique audience, right? If we look at viewership, we’re growing, we’re scaling, we’re delivering uniqueness, we’re driving incrementality. And so being able to connect that lower funnel through remarketing and showcasing how the impact of a display ad really drives you further through through the funnel within Amazon is something that’s been really exciting for advertisers to see firsthand.”

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