Patriots President Jonathan Kraft said the NFL "made a pretty material investment" of about $90M in Fanatics when it took a stake in the online retail firm in May. Kraft said that as Fanatics "builds up scale in the licensed sports business globally," the ability to have equity in a company -- one that will "hopefully do a great job of serving fan basses globally with their passion for licensed sports products -- that will be a great equity investment for the National Football League." Kraft, appearing on Forbes' "SportsMoney" podcast to discuss the business of the NFL, also said with the new Amazon Prime relationship for "Thursday Night Football," the NFL will have a "much better understanding of how people are watching, what they’re watching, but more importantly, the demographic makeup of those people." Kraft: "We won't know who they are individually, but Amazon will know what the profile of those individual people are and how much time they’re watching, which teams they’re watching on Thursday nights, do they watch every Thursday night -- and all of that goes together to help make us smarter about our overall fan base." Kraft added that this information will allow the NFL to "start tailoring the advertising to those people" and "provide advertisers with a higher value audience." Kraft said the league is "constantly working on ways of taking all different pieces of our content and making it relevant" for the fan base. He added the NFL also is "trying to make sure that there are really good tie-ins for our business partners, because the one thing that we've seen -- and it’s grown and grown -- is that the passion that exists ... allows us to have really strong relationships with our business partners" ("SportsMoney," FORBES.com, 8/31).
