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How Amazon turned its Thursday Night Football into a two-pronged pitch to capture ad dollars
As the NFL season and holiday shopping season both kick off, U.S. advertisers are devoting more budget to Amazon’s ad inventory.
For the e-commerce giant, Thursday Night Football coverage has proven a particularly useful tool to expand its advertising and streaming business. The company has successfully used the TNF audience to convert brands that don’t sell products on its e-commerce site, like American Express, amid fierce competition among DSP providers. But it’s also positioned its live sports portfolio as an upsell option for brands that do shift product on its retail platform, but which don’t typically bother with sports advertising, like Colgate.
Parent Colgate-Palmolive spent $1.51 billion on advertising in the first six months of 2026 alone, according to SEC filings. But the toothpaste maker hasn’t run a Super Bowl ad in seven years, and its sports marketing activity largely centers on a Madison Square Garden sponsorship for Big East March Madness. And yet, it’s all in on football on Amazon.
“It allows us to reach consumers through their entire journey,” said Kim McCormack, senior manager, integrated marketing for Colgate Total. As part of an effort to reach younger male consumers, it’s been running a campaign featuring Amon-Ra St. Brown of the Detroit Lions across Colgate’s Brand Store and Amazon Fire TV home screen slots, as well as Amazon Prime Video, including TNF.
Following an initial partnership during the 2025 football season, Colgate Total opted to re-up ahead of the current season. That campaign featured Atlanta Falcons’ running back Bijan Robinson and drove purchase rates up by eight times, doubled branded searches and aided brand awareness increase of 3%, and an aided ad awareness increase of 5%, per a study conducted last year by Lucid.
“Leveraging Amazon data to be able to retarget consumers who have seen our TNF spot and show them contextually relevant assets on the retail platform to further drive them down the funnel… is very important to us,” said McCormack. She declined to say how much Colgate was spending on Amazon Prime.
It’s easy to forget the questions advertisers and buyers — worried about streaming glitches or viewer reluctance — had when Amazon first stepped into the sports streaming arena in 2022-2023. Those concerns have largely been quashed. “Consumers are well past the hurdle of streaming and the fragmentation of sports on alternate platforms,” said one holdco media buyer, who exchanged candor for anonymity.
That’s borne out in its viewership figures. Prime Video’s stream of the Steelers-Browns matchup on Oct. 1 was the most-watched week four game in the history of its coverage, notching up a 19% higher audience than 2025’s week four Seahawks-Cardinals game, according to Nielsen Big Panel data.
Advertisers have caught on. Prime Video has charted a 6% increase in TNF advertisers so far this season, and since 2022 it’s brought over 80 brands new to TNF, and 33 new to NBA coverage (which started last year) — as well as 54 brands new to Amazon itself, through live sports — according to comments made by Billy Davis, Amazon’s head of US live sports sales, at Advertising Week earlier this month.
Media buyers said the platform’s combination of inventory, data and targeting capabilities have made it a straightforward sell to clients. “Their sales pitch has certainly worked,” said Adam Schwartz, svp, director of national broadcast, sports media, at Horizon Media.
For non-endemics, it has served as a “gateway” to Amazon’s wider ad network. Joe O’Connor, senior director of innovation and growth at Tinuiti, said that advertisers had often used TNF, and other Amazon sports properties, to “test” the platform’s capabilities — before increasing the media dollars they manage through its DSP to other destinations. As a result, Tinuiti clients were set to increase their Amazon DSP spending this year, he added.
Endemic brands, however, are less likely to have sports activations running in other categories — and more likely to sweat the details of ad effectiveness. To persuade them, Amazon execs have emphasized Prime as a means to connect sales data with ad exposure, while accessing sports inventory without the need to go through TV upfronts negotiations.
“TNF is often a significant national media add-on, giving brands a way to extend into national sports without the substantial upfront commitments typically associated with traditional broadcast networks,” said Luke Fowler, vp at KSM Media.
Amy McDevitt, head of sports brand partnership at Amazon Ads, told Digday the company is actively promoting full-funnel media buys to advertisers of both stripes. “Their campaigns can be much more impactful and effective, if they add multiple sports [and] if they add upper and lower funnel inventory,” she argued.
TNF is “crucial cultural appointment viewing in many cases, [it] gets right to the heart of households across the country,” said Darren D’Altorio, svp paid media at Wpromote.
D’Altorio said TNF, as well as other Amazon sports properties like its NBA coverage, were driving an increase in spending among Wpromote clients. Brands that sold on the platform frequently make use of Amazon’s retargeting abilities, while the coverage’s conduit to middle America makes it attractive to advertisers that don’t.
“Those two pathways have been a winning combination for brands, both endemic and non-endemic, and that is driving growth for us,” he said.
Finally, the fact that Amazon Prime subscribers include consumers that opt out of other streaming services for cost reasons means the platform grants advertisers access to a potentially hard-to-reach constituency, said KSM’s Fowler.
It’s a point echoed by McDevitt. “We have a unique value proposition, in that, whether you’re going to continue watching TNF weeks four, five or six, you’re still going to want to get your diapers and razors by tomorrow,” she said.
Overall, TNF’s positioning is proving key in Amazon’s efforts to entice endemic advertisers to add incremental ad dollars — and raise the ceiling on what they’re willing to spend with the platform.
That offer won’t be as effective for retailers without a national presence, or which aim to sell products that typically require more research and planning than dental supplies, noted Horizon Media’s Schwartz.
“It certainly works for a lot of brands, but it’s not going to work for every brand,” he said. “There’s a lot of waste if you buy Thursday Night Football, and it’s only really benefiting you when [a game is played] in those in those specific regions that your product is sold.”
But in the meantime, it’s helping Amazon greatly in its efforts to take it to the house, as it were.
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