How sports could fuel Amazon's advertising ambitions

And last spring, Amazon struck a deal with the league to sell thousands of items for the profit-hungry football league."It's a perfect time for them riding the wave of last season to take this over, because interest has never been higher, not just in the NFL or among sports advertisers, but the general market is buying into NFL more and more because they need to find ratings points missing from TV," said David Campanelli, an executive vice president and co-chief investment officer of the media-investment firm Horizon Media.Sports and news have been the two programming genres keeping pay-TV subscribers in the fold, though even that stronghold is eroding. New advertising, merchandise, and subscriber revenue in turn fuels Amazon's ability to do deals like its $8 billion acquisition of MGM to further grow Prime Video."It may not generate $2 billion of incremental sales, but if they can generate $1 billion and a couple hundred million in advertising and sell an extra billion dollars in merchandise — and keep it away from a competitor — that has value," said Ed Desser, the president of Desser Media, a sports-TV consultancy.Sports have also driven new Prime subscribers. The NFL averaged 17.1 million viewers for a regular-season game last year, up 10%.As for Amazon, it said that as of April 2021, Prime had more than 200 million subscribers, 175 million of whom had watched a movie or TV show on Prime Video.The sports marketplace hopes Amazon will bring not only scale but innovation to the presentation of NFL games, which typically have two sports broadcasters and a former player calling them. How can we market potentially other things to that audience?" said Tim Scanlan, a vice president of sports broadcast and media at Octagon, a sports sponsorship and management company that represents Storm and Kremer.Greenfield expects Amazon to bring innovation to advertising, too, with ads customized to individuals in the stadium, for instance.