If you shopped on Amazon this year, you’d have been hard-pressed to miss the marketing for some of Prime Video’s biggest programming swings yet.
On Amazon.com? You might have seen a video on the homepage plugging Thursday Night Football, which streams on Prime Video free for Amazon Prime members. Signed up for Prime? Maybe you checked out a special sneak peek from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power before clicking Buy Now. Shipments of toothpaste and an extra phone charger may have come in branded cardboard boxes promoting the programs.
And that’s just the start of it: The company also has Amazon Music, Wondery, Audible, Twitch, and more, all of which can serve as marketing platforms as needed.
“Using all of those tools, we can actually connect with customers and enable them to go deeper with the content that we’re putting out,” Greg Coleman, Amazon’s global head of marketing and franchise, told Marketing Brew.
Those efforts illustrate the extent of the scale Amazon has at its disposal to try and turn its content into successes in the face of mounting competition in streaming. And while some of the viewership results so far have been uneven, its marketing execs are eager to keep using some of those touchpoints to continue promoting its biggest entertainment bets.
“Working within the Amazon ecosystem is a marketer’s dream,” Coleman said.
Everywhere all at once
Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is planned to have five seasons, is the most expensive television series ever made, so it stands to reason why marketing the series led to Amazon’s biggest cross-promotional push ever. Within the Amazon ecosystem alone, that included:
- The delivery of more than 150 million branded packages, which included specialty boxes and branded tape
- The distribution of ~2.5 million Power-branded Amazon Fresh bags
- The wrapping of 2,000 delivery vans around the country in 25+ markets
Add to that list other internal promotional efforts, like an official show podcast on Wondery, a VR experience at TwitchCon, and special features on Amazon Books, to promote the series to fans of author J.R.R. Tolkien.
“All of the work that we’re doing is in service of either a larger marketing message or connecting with customers in ways that they’ve indicated an appetite for,” Coleman said.
Coleman was “thrilled” with the response to the show so far, though he didn’t share what the company’s marketing objectives for the show were. The Rings of Power’s two-episode premiere was viewed by more than 25 million people in its first day, Prime Video’s largest premiere yet; overall, Coleman said more than 100 million people watched the series.
Through the uprights
For Thursday Night Football, promotions included similar efforts as The Rings of Power, including van-wrapping and branded boxes. But it also got a special treatment with front-page placement on Amazon.com, where upcoming games were promoted with a countdown clock. That homepage placement is big: according to data from Similarweb, Amazon’s website was visited 2.6 billion times in October.
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“Our goal was really creating that brand linkage—making sure football fans across the US knew that Thursday Night Football was going to be on Prime Video [and] knew how to find it, where to find it,” Jared Goldsmith, current lead of sports marketing at Amazon Prime Video, explained.
Part of what people love about football, Goldsmith said, is the chance to show off their fandom through merchandise. Naturally, there is a tie-in there: Amazon built an NFL shop to encourage viewers to purchase items as part of their Thursday Night Football viewing experience.
Thursday Night Football helped drive record sign-ups to Prime at the beginning of the season, but viewership of the franchise has slumped according to Nielsen, averaging just under 10 million (Amazon’s internal metrics say the average has hovered around 11.4 million). Compare that to last year, when Thursday Night Football brought in an average of 16 million viewers on Fox, Prime Video, and the NFL Network.
However, Goldsmith stressed that the viewership of the matchups have attracted younger viewers who are attractive to advertisers, around “seven years younger than the average NFL audience.”
Fine-tune it
Through the fall, Goldsmith and Coleman were privy to impression numbers and conversion data, which has helped them tweak their strategies. While they declined to share some of those metrics, Goldsmith said some initiatives, including branded vans or branded packages, that ran in one local market but not another allowed for them to glean certain insights about performance.
Since both The Rings of Power and Thursday Night Football are multi-year commitments, both Coleman and Goldsmith will take lessons from this year into 2023 and beyond to further fine-tune their approaches, they said.
“We’ll think about the show first, and, and the customer, and really match them up along the way,” Coleman said. “It creates a really fun sandbox.”
Editor's note 1/4/23: This story has been updated to reflect Jared Goldsmith's current job title.