I just experienced something completely new as a sports fan on Friday.
No, I didn’t get to see the Seattle Mariners win a World Series. No, I didn’t make a hole-in-one on the golf course.
I watched Amazon’s Black Friday NFL broadcast.
This was the Seattle tech company’s latest foray into sports, thanks to its $100 million deal with the NFL to stream the first-ever Black Friday game.
Amazon, which already has an exclusive deal to stream Thursday Night Football games through 2033, used the Black Friday broadcast to test new in-game shopping features, bringing together the company’s e-commerce marketplace with its live sports streaming arm.
The result was a bevy of QR codes shown during breaks that promoted Black Friday deals for products on Amazon.com, as well as other advertiser websites.
Amazon put out a handful of limited time “Black Friday Football offers” — for example, a Nintendo Switch bundle that became available during the first quarter, and an Apple Watch Series 9 deal shown in the second quarter. Scanning the QR code took customers to Amazon.com.
The commercials also had scannable QR codes for other products on Amazon.com, such as NERF toys, Gillette shavers, or Meta’s VR headset.
Advertisements from companies such as Priceline and Carnival had QR codes that pointed customers to their own website.
There was also an alternative to QR codes while watching on my TV via a Fire TV Stick — you could press a button on the Fire TV Stick remote to agree to an app notification and email from Amazon about an ad.
The broadcast had traditional ads from companies like Discover and State Farm. Amazon sold out its ad inventory for the game; 30-second spots were reportedly going for upwards of $900,000, more than double what it charges for Thursday Night games.
Amazon also showed its own ads promoting Prime Video content or the post-game Garth Brooks concert produced by Amazon Music.
So is this the future of how we’ll watch sports?
For me, the QR codes made the commercial breaks a tad more compelling, just knowing that I could potentially get access or info about a deal.
However, it got cumbersome to continuously whip out my phone and try to scan the QR codes on my TV before the commercial ended.
I also had the game streaming on my laptop. It would have been nice to be able to just click an ad or a button versus scanning a QR code with my phone pointed at the computer screen.
Amazon already offers “X-ray” features on its NFL streams, showing various statistics adjacent to the live action. Perhaps in the future they’ll embed a shopping experience in this way, letting customers purchase products straight from the streaming experience.
For advertisers, and Amazon, the QR codes provide a new way to measure effectiveness of in-game ads. And for consumers, it offers a clear way to buy something — without having to drive to a store, or spend time searching online.
Joe Pompliano, an entrepreneur and investor, said Amazon’s broadcast is “a view into how brand advertising could look in the future.” He noted how Amazon rolled out a new strategy called “audience-based creative,” allowing advertisers to target different audience segments with different ads in the same time slot.
“Companies like Amazon and Apple are only going to spend more money on live sports rights, and their ad targeting could change how brands market forever,” he wrote on X this week.
The company’s Black Friday broadcast is the latest example of Amazon using sports streaming to drive growth in other areas of its business such as online retail or advertising, which continues to expand, bringing in $12 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 26% over a year ago.
Amazon typically requires a Prime membership to watch Thursday Night games — a strategy that helps boost Prime sign-ups — but opened the Black Friday stream to anyone with an Amazon account.
The company, which is competing with other tech giants such as Google and Apple for valuable sports streaming rights, says its Thursday Night Football viewership numbers are up 26% year-over-year.
