How Amazon turned Thursday Night Football into a two-pronged pitch

Amazon is using Thursday Night Football as a two-sided conversion engine: for non-endemics like American Express it is the gateway into the full ad stack, and for endemic brands that sell on the platform but skip sports, like Colgate-Palmolive, it is the upsell. Colgate spent US$1.51 billion on advertising in the first half of 2026 alone but had not run a Super Bowl ad in seven years, and is now all-in on football on Amazon. Kim McCormack, senior manager for integrated marketing at Colgate Total, explained the appeal: "It allows us to reach consumers through their entire journey," citing a campaign with the Detroit Lions' Amon-Ra St. Brown that drove purchase rates up eight times, doubled branded searches, and lifted aided ad awareness 5% in a Lucid study. The audience is there to be sold: Prime Video's Steelers-Browns stream on 1 Oct was its most-watched week-four game ever, up 19% on 2025, and Amazon says TNF advertisers are up 6% this season, with 80 brands new to TNF since 2022. "Their sales pitch has certainly worked," said Adam Schwartz, SVP and director of national broadcast at Horizon Media, while Tinuiti's Joe O'Connor described TNF as a "gateway" that ends with clients increasing Amazon DSP spend elsewhere.

The crux

Live sports is Amazon's cheapest on-ramp into advertiser budgets, converting a content property into both a retail-media upsell and a DSP land-grab in a single pitch.

Sell-side read

The playbook is exclusive live rights plus first-party purchase data: for publishers without either, the lesson is that a content asset only compounds if it feeds a data asset, otherwise the platform captures the incremental budget.

Watch

Whether Amazon's NBA coverage, now in its second year, reproduces the TNF conversion engine among the 33 brands already new to it.