Somehow, Amazon has made Black Friday even bigger. This year, Prime Video has planned 15 hours of exclusive live sports broadcasts, starting with a return of the PGA Tour’s Skins Game in the morning, including a Bears vs. Eagles NFL tilt, and concluding with a pair of NBA Cup contests.
“It shows how we’ve grown as a sports programming destination,” Prime Video VP of global live sports production Jared Stacy said. “Hopefully there’s a bunch of people across the country and actually the world that put on Prime during the day and leave it on throughout the night.”
The day begins at 9 a.m. ET with The Capital One Skins Game, which will see Keegan Bradley, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry and Xander Schauffele start with $1 million apiece on the scoreboard and the opportunity to win—or lose—money on each hole.
The concept dates to the 1980s and had been a Thanksgiving weekend staple until disappearing in 2009. Pro Shop, Propagate Content and PGA Tour Studios worked to revive the competition over the last year, with Prime Video head of sports partnerships Charlie Neiman leading the charge from Amazon’s side. Ultimately the event was moved to Florida and a morning time slot to best fit in with Prime’s slate. “We’re thrilled to help relaunch the Skins Game as part of an unprecedented day of live sports,” Neiman said when the return was announced.
“Not only did they have a real interest in the Skins Game itself … but they also had a great plan,” Propagate co-CEO Ben Silverman said of Amazon. “My guess is it will have the largest audience of any platform in the world that particular Friday morning.”
The NFL continues to anchor the day, wedged into the 3 p.m. ET slot in part due to legal restrictions on when the NFL can play weekday games. Last year, an average of 13.5 million tuned into watch the Chiefs and Raiders, up 41% over the prior season. This time around, Amazon will feature two 8-3 teams from major markets. The game will also be available to stream worldwide without a Prime subscription, setting up an interesting comparison with the Week 1 contest that aired on YouTube earlier this season.
Despite the NFL and NBA being America’s two biggest pro sports leagues, it’s rare to have the former lead directly into the latter on TV given the way their broadcasting schedules are constructed. But after the Black Friday NFL game, Amazon will turn its attention to the NBA, where NBA Cup group play is set to conclude on Friday. Prime Video will stream the Bucks vs. Knicks at 7:30 p.m., followed by Mavericks vs. Lakers at 10.
Prime’s new NBA studio team will be in their custom-built L.A. studio to break down games throughout the night. The set itself also has a starring role to play in one of the many sponsorship activations Amazon has planned throughout the day as it weaves sports and shopping together, with Avatar: Fire and Ash taking over the studio’s multi-surface display in an ad for the December film.
Amazon has also continued to roll out QR code and remote-shoppable ads. One of the interactive in-game spots during the NFL game will allow fans to add a newly released Pepsi Prebiotic Cola directly to their Amazon carts. Bushnell Golf has signed on for a range of promotional spots during the morning festivities. Amazon says it has seen a 40% year-over-year increase in Black Friday advertisers as it expanded its sports offering, with the number of advertisers who bought time despite not selling directly on Amazon’s site growing 50% year over year.
“You can have someone like Capital One who thinks about it across the entire day,” Amazon head of U.S. video and live sports sales Danielle Carney said, “or you have partners like Bushnell, who’s really focused on something so intrinsic to their brand like golf.”
Anyone watching Prime Video’s daylong sports offering, ads and all, will come away with the best sense yet of how—and why—Amazon has grown its sports broadcasting ambitions with a unique business model to monetize the increasingly expensive rights it now regularly bids on. With any luck, those viewers might also find a few new items in their order history by the end of the day.