Amazon pitches Thursday Night Football as a gateway to its DSP and a retail upsell

Amazon is selling Thursday Night Football (TNF) on Prime Video to US advertisers in two different ways, Digiday reported on 19 October 2026. Amazon has used the TNF audience to win brands that do not sell on Amazon, such as American Express, and one agency executive told Digiday such advertisers often use TNF as a "gateway" to test Amazon's ad stack before moving more spend through Amazon DSP. Brands that do sell on Amazon but rarely buy sports, such as Colgate, are pitched TNF as a full-funnel add-on that ties ad exposure to sales data and lets them retarget viewers on Amazon's retail site, without the upfront commitments of traditional TV deals.

The report, How Amazon turned its Thursday Night Football into a two-pronged pitch to capture ad dollars, is by Sam Bradley. It draws on Amazon executives, a Colgate marketer and several US media buyers. This article sets out the figures Digiday reported, who said what, what the report leaves open, and what the model suggests for advertisers outside the US, including in Thailand, where the source says nothing directly.

The two pitches Amazon makes for Thursday Night Football

Digiday frames the strategy around one distinction: whether a brand sells products on Amazon's store. Advertisers in that position are "endemic" to the retail platform; those that do not are "non-endemic."

For non-endemic brands, Digiday reports that TNF has been a way for Amazon to win advertisers "amid fierce competition among DSP providers." One senior US agency executive told Digiday that advertisers have often used TNF and other Amazon sports properties to "test" what Amazon's platform can do, and then increased the media money they run through Amazon DSP to other destinations. The same executive said that agency's clients planned to raise their Amazon DSP spending this year.

For endemic brands, the problem is different. Digiday says these brands are less likely to run sports campaigns elsewhere and more likely to scrutinise ad effectiveness closely. To persuade them, Amazon executives have stressed that Prime Video connects sales data with ad exposure and gives access to sports inventory without going through TV upfront negotiations. A US media buyer quoted in the report described TNF as a significant national media add-on that lets brands extend into national sports without the large upfront commitments usually tied to broadcast networks.

The Colgate case: a sports-shy brand going all in on football

Colgate is Digiday's main example of the endemic pitch. Parent company Colgate-Palmolive spent $1.51 billion on advertising in the first six months of 2026, according to SEC filings cited by Digiday. Yet the toothpaste maker has not run a Super Bowl ad in seven years, and Digiday says its sports marketing largely centres on a Madison Square Garden sponsorship for Big East March Madness.

On Amazon, the picture is different. Kim McCormack, senior manager of integrated marketing for Colgate Total, told Digiday the platform "allows us to reach consumers through their entire journey." To reach younger male consumers, Colgate Total is running a campaign featuring Amon-Ra St. Brown of the Detroit Lions across Colgate's Brand Store on Amazon, Amazon Fire TV home-screen slots, and Prime Video, including TNF.

Colgate Total first partnered with Amazon during the 2025 football season and renewed ahead of the current one. Digiday reports that the campaign featuring Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson drove purchase rates up by eight times, doubled branded searches, and produced a 3% increase in aided brand awareness and a 5% increase in aided ad awareness, according to a study conducted last year by Lucid. Digiday does not give the baseline or comparison group behind the eight-times figure.

McCormack said using Amazon data to retarget consumers who had seen Colgate's TNF spot, and showing them contextually relevant assets on the retail platform, was "very important to us." She declined to say how much Colgate spends on Amazon Prime.

The figures in Digiday's report

The report contains a small number of hard figures, each with its own source. The table below lists them with the attribution Digiday gives.

On viewership, Digiday reports that Prime Video's stream of the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Cleveland Browns on 1 October 2026 was the most-watched week-four game in the history of its coverage, with an audience 19% higher than 2025's week-four Seahawks-Cardinals game, according to Nielsen Big Panel data.

On advertisers, Digiday says Prime Video has recorded a 6% increase in TNF advertisers so far this season. It cites comments by Billy Davis, Amazon's head of US live sports sales, at Advertising Week earlier this month, that since 2022 Amazon has brought more than 80 brands new to TNF, 33 brands new to its NBA coverage, which started last year, and 54 brands new to Amazon itself through live sports.

What Amazon's executives said

Amy McDevitt, head of sports brand partnership at Amazon Ads, told Digiday the company is actively promoting full-funnel media buys to both kinds of advertiser. "Their campaigns can be much more impactful and effective, if they add multiple sports [and] if they add upper and lower funnel inventory," she said.

McDevitt also made the commerce argument directly: whether a viewer keeps watching TNF in weeks four, five or six, "you're still going to want to get your diapers and razors by tomorrow." Digiday concludes that TNF's positioning is central to Amazon's effort to get endemic advertisers to add incremental money and raise the ceiling on what they spend with the platform.

How US buyers described it

Digiday quotes several US media buyers. Their views, paraphrased here, run broadly positive with one clear limit.

• An anonymous holding-company media buyer said consumers are well past the hurdle of streaming and of sports being split across platforms. Digiday notes that concerns about streaming glitches and viewer reluctance, common when Amazon entered sports streaming in 2022 and 2023, have largely faded.
• A senior broadcast and sports buyer said Amazon's sales pitch has worked, and buyers told Digiday the mix of inventory, data and targeting has made it a straightforward sell to clients.
• A paid media executive called TNF appointment viewing that reaches households across the US, and said TNF and Amazon's NBA coverage were driving higher spending among that agency's clients. Brands that sell on Amazon often use its retargeting, while brands that do not are drawn by its reach into middle America.
• One buyer added that Prime subscribers include people who drop other streaming services for cost reasons, which gives advertisers access to a group that can be hard to reach.

The limit came from the same senior buyer who praised the pitch. The offer works less well for retailers without national distribution, or for products that need more research and planning than dental supplies. That buyer warned that TNF involves a lot of waste for a brand whose product is sold only in specific regions, because the buy only pays off where the product is available.

What the report does not say

Several things a planner would want are missing from the Digiday report:

• No prices, CPMs or minimum spends for TNF inventory, and no spend figure for Colgate, which declined to share one.
• No figures for how much non-endemic brands moved into Amazon DSP after testing TNF, beyond one agency saying its clients' DSP spend was set to rise this year.
• No detail on how the Lucid study was designed, or what the eight-times purchase rate was compared against.
• No information about markets outside the US. The report is about US advertisers, US viewership and US sales teams.

How this fits RA's earlier Amazon Ads coverage

The Digiday story connects to several Amazon Ads developments Relevant Audience has covered. On 30 September 2026 RA reported Amazon's unBoxed 2026 announcements, including Full-Funnel Campaigns that put sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV into one AI-run campaign for US advertisers. On 2 October 2026 RA reported Amazon's estimate that about 20% of a brand's sales value on Amazon arrives after the standard attribution window. On 13 September 2026 RA covered the pilot that lets select US advertisers buy ChatGPT inventory through Amazon DSP.

Read together, and this is RA's analysis rather than Digiday's, the pattern is consistent: Amazon uses premium or novel inventory to bring advertisers into its buying tools, then sells the connection to its own sales data as the reason to keep spending there. TNF is the sports version of that approach.

What this means for Thai marketers

The Digiday report says nothing about Thailand or Southeast Asia, and TNF advertising on Prime Video as described is a US product. Digiday gives no route for Thai advertisers to buy it. The following is analysis of what the model suggests, not something the source stated.

The useful idea is the closed loop. Amazon's pitch to Colgate rests on three linked parts: a high-attention video placement, sales data from the same company's store, and the ability to retarget people who saw the ad when they next shop. Any marketplace or commerce platform that sells ads and holds purchase data can in principle offer some version of that loop. For a Thai brand selling through marketplaces, the questions to put to any such platform are the ones Digiday's buyers raised:

• Can the platform show which shoppers were exposed to an upper-funnel ad and what they bought afterwards, and over what window? Amazon's own estimate that about 20% of sales land after the attribution window shows how much the window choice matters.
• Can exposed viewers be retargeted on the store itself, and is that audience available to you or only to the platform?
• Does the reach match where you actually sell? The waste warning about regional brands buying a national US game applies just as much to a brand whose distribution is concentrated in Bangkok buying national reach.

Brands that do not sell on a marketplace can still take the other lesson: platforms often use premium inventory as a test drive for their wider ad tools. Running that test with clear measurement in your own analytics, rather than relying only on the platform's reporting, makes the result easier to compare with other channels. For marketplace and retail media planning, see RA's ecommerce marketing service; for online video, the same reach-versus-distribution question applies to YouTube ads. A sound GA4 setup is what lets you check a platform's sales-lift claims against your own numbers.

FAQ

What is Amazon's two-pronged Thursday Night Football pitch?

Amazon sells TNF one way to brands that do not sell on Amazon, as a gateway to test its ad stack and then spend more through Amazon DSP, and another way to brands that do sell on Amazon, as a full-funnel add-on that links ad exposure to sales data and allows retargeting on the retail site, Digiday reported on 19 October 2026.

How much did TNF advertisers grow this season?

Prime Video has recorded a 6% increase in TNF advertisers so far this season, according to Digiday, citing comments by Amazon's Billy Davis at Advertising Week in October 2026. Davis also said that since 2022 Amazon has brought more than 80 brands new to TNF and 54 brands new to Amazon through live sports.

What results did Colgate's 2025 Amazon football campaign get?

Colgate Total's 2025 football-season campaign on Amazon drove purchase rates up eight times, doubled branded searches, and lifted aided brand awareness by 3% and aided ad awareness by 5%, according to a Lucid study cited by Digiday. Digiday did not report Colgate's spend or the study's comparison baseline.

Is TNF advertising a good buy for every brand?

No, according to one US buyer quoted by Digiday, who said TNF wastes money for brands without national distribution because the buy only helps where the product is sold. The same buyer said it works less well for products that need more research before purchase.

Can Thai advertisers buy this?

The Digiday report covers only US advertisers and US viewership, and says nothing about availability in Thailand. The closed-loop idea of linking video exposure to marketplace sales is the transferable part, not the TNF inventory itself.

Amazon's TNF pitch is a clear example of a retailer using premium video and its own sales data to compete for budgets that would otherwise go through TV upfronts or rival DSPs. If you want to work out which retail media and video options actually fit where your products are sold, Relevant Audience can help you plan and measure it.