Amazon has enhanced targeting capabilities on deck for advertisers that want to reach custom cohorts with distinct and specific messaging simultaneously during Prime Video’s NFL Thursday Night Football coverage this season, with the launch of audience-based creatives.
During Amazon’s NewFronts presentation Monday, VP of Global Ad Sales Alan Moss noted that in a first for NFL ads, Amazon will offer the ability to leverage the company’s insights to decide which audiences see which ads, with the ability to segment NFL audiences into custom groups for improved ad relevance.
For example, Moss said on stage that an auto brand could run a sports car ad that’s shown to a younger-adult audience, a commercial featuring an SUV to sports and outdoorsy audience segments, and a general brand spot to all other Thursday Night Football viewers – all at the same time, within the same 30-second ad position.
Advertisers can run creative that is designed to each segment based on geographic, demographic and behavioral signals.
Moss said this will be particularly impactful for advertisers in Amazon’s exclusive stream of the first-ever Black Friday NFL game, which is scheduled for Friday November 24 and will be available for free to all viewers, not just Prime Video members. The game will help “brands cut through the clutter” and help maximize Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, according to Moss.
In another first for NFL advertisers, Amazon is also introducing interactive video ads for TNF, enabling viewers on Fire TV devices to engage with a brand ad using their voice or remote. Through QR codes and calls to action, more information can be sent to viewers’ email, or they can add products to a cart, or make a purchase without needing to stop the game feed, according to Moss.
During New York Ad Week last fall, Jeremy Carey, chief investment officer for Optimum Sports, discussed the live sports opportunity for marketers, specifically with NFL’s TNF on Amazon Prime, pointing to its skew of younger and more affluent viewership base as well as potential to couple with Amazon’s massive e-commerce business.
“So you’ve got scale married with scale,” Carey commented in October, noting content comes first but now it’s NFL content that is in an environment that is that much closer to a point of transaction where data can come back “and give us the attribution models we’re looking for.”
On the measurement front, Amazon on Monday named VideoAmp and iSpot as new streaming TV measurement providers, leveraging the vendors to measure cross-screen impressions and reach, including out-of-home and local stations, in complement to first-party measurement from Amazon Ads.
And interactive pause ads are poised for testing on Amazon’s FAST service Freevee later this year, which Moss said “create high-impact brand moments and reimagine a viewer’s pause experience with shoppable calls to action.” It will also offer brand storytelling with beta testing of sequential streaming TV ads on the free ad-supported streaming TV service.
As it relates to FAST content, Monday’s presentation also included the launch of Fire TV Channels to aggregate free streaming content from various providers – read more on that effort with insights from Fire TV head of advertising Charlotte Maines here.