Amazon’s new NFL "TNF" streaming deal "could be a chance to bring television advertising to the digital age," though the question is if the company "even wants to," according to Mike Shields of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. As part of the deal, Amazon is "entitled to sell two minutes per hour of advertising during the games." Amazon "indicated that it will use some of that time to promote its original series, which have gained steam in recent years with hit shows like 'Sneaky Pete' and 'Man in the High Castle.'" But there "may be a bigger opportunity for the online retailer, which hasn’t said much else about the advertising angle of the deal." Amazon has a "history of quietly nudging into sectors of the advertising business before ramping up its ambitions." If its execs are "so inclined, Amazon could use the football games to experiment with presenting different ads to different consumers at the same time, which could theoretically represent the future of web-delivered TV advertising." Toronto-based brand solutions firm One2one Media President Michael Bologna said, "It could be a whole new level of addressability. They’d know I am an NFL fan, that I drink Pepsi and eat Doritos" (WSJ.com, 4/6).
WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: OTT vendor Ooyala Principal Analyst Jim O’Neill said that after "testing with Yahoo and Twitter in recent years," the NFL-Amazon deal is "like a booster rocket that will take the games’ broadcast to outer space." O'Neill: "Amazon gets it. They’re really looking at this as a brand builder. They understand what original content is, and they’re looking at live sports and saying, 'This is something new that we can do, that Netflix [is] not doing.'" O'Neill: "If this goes well, it’s the NFL’s precursor step to becoming a true a la carte offering. Maybe on Amazon or maybe another platform, maybe its own platform. I think all content creators eventually are going to go to their own platforms. It’s not necessarily going to be something they build in-house, but it’s going to go direct to consumers. There’s a huge chance of that." Barclays analysts in a research note wrote, "We believe Amazon has the potential to be a major disruptor long term relative to other OTT entrants. NFL essentially used Twitter as a proof of concept last year to validate a new source of revenues which, while small in absolute terms, is already showing significant inflation and more importantly, bringing additional bidders into the NFL orbit" (FIERCECABLE.com, 4/6). THE MMQB's Albert Breer noted the NFL's $50M deal with Amazon is "worth your attention." It is "worth five times what last year’s Twitter deal was, and it’s likely a precursor for upcoming changes when the TV deals expire" in '22 (MMQB.SI.com, 4/6).
