Amazon established a new Thanksgiving weekend tradition last fall: NFL football on Black Friday.
Transforming Black Friday, once considered the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season, into another day to sit at home and watch football has been considered a genius strategy by the ecommerce behemoth. Not only does Black Friday football discourage consumers from shopping at Amazon’s brick and mortar competitors, it has helped transform connected television into a direct response channel and further shrink the distance between the top and bottom ends of the marketing funnel.
“We are quickly entering the era of performance TV, and the top CTV platforms are in the best position to capitalize,” says independent media analyst Andrew Lipsman. “Their embrace of live sports content guarantees the scale to command bigger budgets, while their ability to close the loop on sales is their x-factor.”
As an example, Lipsman pointed to the shoppable ads marketers embraced during this year’s Black Friday football broadcast on Prime Video. The ads allow users to add an item to their Amazon shopping carts directly from an ad or peruse a carousel of items during ad breaks. The captive audience of a football game combined with Black Friday deals and direct conversion tracking made an alluring pitch for CPG brands.
For decades, television was the premiere brand-building channel in all of advertising. It offered the most dynamic creative canvas as well as the furthest reach. But the introduction of connected television — that is, television delivered via the internet, be it through a set-top box such as Roku or Apple TV, or through “smart” TVs that directly connect to the internet — have allowed marketers to target and track their TV campaigns with unprecedented depth and precision, treating TV as a performance marketing channel.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in live sports, which remains the last vestige of appointment TV viewing and thus the most sought-after programming category in all of television. Of the 15 highest-rated telecasts in 2023, 14 of them were NFL games. The top 100 was dominated by sports, particularly NFL football, with NBA and college football and basketball claiming other slots.
This explains why streamers have been in an arms race for live sports programming. Amazon pays nearly $1 billion a year for the exclusive broadcast rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games. YouTubeTV, YouTube’s live television option, reportedly pays double that for Sunday Ticket, the package that allows NFL fans to watch every game every Sunday. Netflix is shelling out $150 million a year to live broadcast two NFL games on Christmas for the next three years. Apple TV pays Major League Baseball $85 million per year to air games on Friday nights.
For Amazon and YouTubeTV — and, to a lesser extent, Netflix — these deals are about more than selling subscriptions; it’s about bolstering their ad sales businesses and further moving CTV down the funnel. Amazon and YouTube both have shoppable ads that allow viewers to save or even directly buy products advertised during the broadcast. (Netflix's advertising business is still in its infancy, but considering the copycat nature of digital advertising, it’s not hard to imagine it, too, will adopt similar features in the future.)
The appeal for marketers is they don’t have to engage in the long, time- and cost-intensive process of building brand equity with a consumer and gradually nudging them further down the marketing funnel with retargeting ads until they finally convert and purchase. The brand-building and conversion ends of the funnel occur simultaneously — and it’s instantly and accurately measurable.
“Measurability is becoming increasingly important for advertisers as the pressure grows to demonstrate a quantifiable impact for every type of investment,” says Harry Browne, VP of TV, Audio & Display Innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. “Live sports offer streaming platforms an excellent way to support holistic advertising campaigns, combining large, diverse audiences with rich data signals to create a measurable and powerful impact across the full funnel.”
Even if a shopper doesn’t buy instantly, CTV offers measurement capabilities not available on traditional linear TV. CTV platforms often require an email login, allowing the platforms to connect viewership data to offsite activity.
“While advertising on YouTube is most often thought of as a brand awareness strategy, it can also drive lower funnel results such as website visits and even purchases when advertisers use effective CTAs and conversion tracking,” says David George, CEO of Pixability, a YouTube advertising platform.
That’s not to say that live sports advertising will suddenly become inundated with infomercial pitches. Live sports will retain its brand-building value, though even that will be more measurable. Bud Light, for instance, has been able to mount a comeback this year by advertising heavily during NFL games and with creative that harkens back to the brand’s bro-y roots.
“CTV is the internet-ification of TV, and that means a shift to performance,” says Brian Morrissey, owner of the media industry newsletter and podcast The Rebooting. “Big live events like football will still be mostly brand vehicles. Amazon and the others are interesting broadcasters because they have different business models than cable and broadcast.”
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