The NFL will host a game on Black Friday for the first time ever, with the New York Jets set to play the Miami Dolphins in an Amazon Prime Video affair after Thanksgiving. And a conspiracy theory has surfaced ahead of the game which suggests that it has nothing to do with football and everything to do with e-commerce.
According to Joe Pompliano, the game is expected to be a very profitable one for Amazon, who offered the league $100 million for streaming rights. They’re also allowing anyone to watch but charging twice as much for 30-second ads as ‘Thursday Night Football’ ad space goes for $440,000 while advertisers will have to pay $880,000 per ad on Friday.
Here’s how fans reacted to this information:
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Last year’s Thanksgiving game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants averaged 33.5 million viewers, which is the most ever for a regular-season game. And it is expected that Black Friday will draw similar numbers, though the league couldn’t have anticipated that Aaron Rodgers wouldn’t be available.
That’s not the only incentive, though. Amazon will also put a new strategy ad called “audience-based creative” into play which will permit brands to target viewers with various ads and encourage them to do some Black Friday shopping as products from commercials can be placed in a user’s cart with just the click of a button – they would not be required to leave the broadcast.
A genius move from Amazon and what appears to be $100 million well spent.
