How Amex is incorporating ‘Thursday Night Football’ into its NFL marketing

The NFL is a giant when it comes to TV viewership, crushing its competition like Los Angeles Rams defensive end Myles Garrett does against pretty much any quarterback he’s up against.

Of the top 100 most watched programs on TV last year, more than half were NFL programs, according to Nielsen ratings. For American Express, which became the league’s official payments partner as of this season, that popularity was exactly the point.

“The NFL is an incredibly rich media opportunity for us,” Jessica Ling, EVP of global advertising at Amex, told Marketing Brew. “We have been advertising in the NFL for a long time, but now that we’re an official [sponsor], it just unlocked more opportunities to integrate into the programming itself [and] deepen our partnerships with networks and broadcasters. That was, for us, always part of the calculus.”

That being said, NFL media rights are extremely fragmented, making those opportunities sometimes disparate. While Amex has a presence in NFL broadcasts across networks, Ling said, its partnership with Amazon Prime Video for Thursday Night Football is particularly deep—and still developing as both companies work to navigate the football landscape.

Attention, please

Prime Video recently kicked off its fifth year as the home of Thursday Night Football, so the streamer is relatively new to the NFL media rights landscape. Despite the popularity of the NFL, ad inventory didn’t immediately fly off the shelf during year one, Amy McDevitt, head of sports brand partnership at Amazon Ads, told us; Amazon was new to live sports and didn’t have much by way of examples to show buyers, so her team leaned on existing relationships and other selling points.

“I think people know at this point, ‘Okay, [on] Thursday, I go to Prime to watch the game,’” McDevitt told us. “It takes a minute to build that awareness and that behavior, but year two, it was a totally different story, and we’ve continued to have really strong demand.”

Prime Video recorded a 6% YoY increase in total Thursday Night Football advertisers this season, which includes five brands that are net-new to the NFL, according to Amazon Ads.

For the Amex team, the opportunity to integrate the brand into Prime Video’s pregame show, TNF Tonight, was appealing because the start of the game is when “attention is super high,” Ling said. Amex is the presenting sponsor of TNF Kickoff for the season, with its branding appearing in 15 regular-season pregame shows and one wild-card pregame show, plus social media extensions to come, she said.

As is the case across Amex sports partnerships, which include the NBA and WNBA, Formula 1, and the US Open, Ling said the goal of the NFL sponsorship is to boost brand consideration by offering cardholders “differentiated experiences and access” to events that they care about. More than 70% of Amex cardmembers are NFL fans, she added.

Personality hire

Another consideration for the Amex team when it comes to sports media buys is off-field talent. For TNF Tonight, that includes studio host Charissa Thompson and analysts Tony Gonzalez, Richard Sherman, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Andrew Whitworth.

As the season progresses, Ling said her team plans to integrate the broadcast and studio team into NFL activations ranging from events to social content.

“Our hope is always that we end up with a program that is deeply watchable, with someone who has a ton of credibility, with a commentator who is energetic,” she said. “We’ve had partnerships with halftime shows [and] pregame shows that have gone on season after season, and these sometimes build their own followings. It’s a really great opportunity for us to be part of the storytelling.”

For advertisers across the board, McDevitt said creative that incorporates broadcast talent tends to outperform “standard brand creative,” adding that the relatability of hosts and analysts helps content stand out to fans.

Targets leader

Amazon’s ad tech was another selling point for Amex, according to Ling. The brand is tapping into Amazon’s audience-based creative offering, which McDevitt said “reduces waste” for advertisers by letting them target multiple consumer groups with one ad buy. Amex marketers, for instance, might want to show a small business owner who uses the company’s corporate products a different ad than they would show to a consumer who uses Amex for their personal credit card, Ling explained.

“The ability to take broad-scale opportunities like live sports and target them based on [the] audience is of massive value to us,” she said.

With leagues themselves, including the NFL, upping the ante on data and fan targeting capabilities for their own teams and sponsors, marketers will likely continue to expect the same, if not more, from sports media rights holders.