How much does the NFL need Amazon?

On the flip side, could Amazon save TV advertising?

Despite the uncertainly surrounding the broadcast and cable television industry, the NFL is expected to totally clean up in its upcoming rights deals. The yet-to-be-completed negotiations are going so well that some insiders are speculating that the league will massively expand its salary cap to share the windfall with the players.

The most interesting wrinkle here is that Amazon is aiming to spend $1 billion a year or so to exclusively stream a package of games, according to CNBC.

Amazon has carried simulcasts of NFL games before. But this would mean the eCommerce juggernaut would have to hire a full-on production crew, producers, announcers, etc. much like Fox starting from scratch in the 1990s.

For Amazon, it seems this deal would, among other things, bring more viewers to Prime Video, and more subscribers to Amazon Prime in general. And for the NFL, you might assume this is just another way of printing more cash.

But I wonder if the stakes are higher than that. I think it’s fair to ask whether the NFL needs Amazon (or another tech player) to thrive in the coming decades.

Why you might ask? After all, the NFL practically is ad-supported TV at the moment. What’s there to worry about? Well, you may not have noticed, but the Super Bowl ratings have been sliding among young people for a decade. Yes, overall football ratings are massive, but trending older.

The bigger long term worry to me - something I’ve written about before, is how impossible it’s becoming to pry a younger generation off of Fortnite or Roblox of Call of Duty and have them sit for a three-hour game and not do anything.

That’s where Amazon comes in. Since they’d be starting from scratch, the company could reinvent the way the games look. The way that sports looks We saw some great experimentation during the most recent NFL playoffs, when a games was aired on Nickelodeon featuring kid-friendly announcers and graphics.

But in my view, the league likely has to go a lot further faster. I’m imagining Twitter feeds baked into the broadcast screen, along with fantasy stats and betting lines and maybe some kind of friend chat function. Give people different camera angles, broadcast teams, whatever.

If it were me, I’d insist that several games be streamed live on Twitch

The NFL has experimented on the live, gamer-centric platform, but in this case, I’d have the broadcasts produced by and truly by of Twitch, featuring familiar influencer talent and live dialogue.

It won’t be for Dad and Grandpa, but that’s the point.

Meanwhile, advertisers and the TV ad business at large could stand to benefit greatly from this deal.

In the past, when Amazon has carried NFL games, the company has managed and sold the few minutes per hour of ad space that would normally be sold locally. And in my view, that’s effort has been underwhelming, given who Amazon is. If Amazon fully controls this Thursday night package, why not use that opportunity to experiment, to reimagine what TV advertising is. At its base level, shouldn’t Amazon try to use data to show different homes different ads?

Thinking bigger, wouldn’t this be the time to finally see if we can marry TV and commerce in a big way that goes well beyond the Home Shopping Network? If anybody could actually get us to interact with ads via our phones and remotes, you’d think it would be the company that knows everything you’ve purchased online for the past 15 years and knows the dog food is about to run out.

This would be presumably good for Amazon’s ad business. This could be revolutionary for the TV ad business, which is far from future proof.

Of course, it’s not Amazon’s job to save anybody.

BTW

I’ve had some really awesome guests of late on the podcast I host, Next in Marketing, which is sponsored by AppsFlyer. Execs from Pinterest, TikTok, Complex Networks, etc. Check it out:

Stuff. you should read:

Snap’s improbably advertising resurgence (Tanya Dua, Lara O’Reilly, Dan Whatley, Business Insider)

Advertising’s unexpected comeback in streaming (Jessica Toonkel, The Information)