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Amazon increasingly sells the US NFL broadcasts of Thursday Night Football as the entry point to a complete advertising chain – from the TV spot through Fire TV and display to a possible purchase in the shop. Examples include 2026 Colgate Total: the brand advertises toothpaste with NFL player Amon-Ra St. Brown and combines the campaign with Amazon's Brand Store, Fire TV placements and Prime Video. The approach is interesting for German media teams because it blurs the boundaries between connected TV and retail media. It is not proof that a sports campaign automatically generates additional sales.
Why the same campaign appears in the living room and in the shopping cart
In traditional TV, a brand buys reach during a game, while purchases are mostly measured elsewhere. Amazon, by contrast, can connect advertising across several of its own surfaces: a contact during Thursday Night Football (TNF) can be combined – provided the respective data and approval requirements are met – with follow-up campaigns in the Amazon DSP, on Fire TV or in its own shopping environment.
According to research by Digiday from 19 October 2026, Colgate Total is using the ongoing NFL season for such a multi-stage campaign. A previous Colgate action with Bijan Robinson reportedly achieved, according to the company, an eightfold higher purchase rate, double the brand-related searches, and increases of three percentage points in aided brand awareness and five percentage points in ad recall. Digiday refers for parts of the brand measurement to a study by Lucid. Without the full methodology, a control group and costs, no generally valid return can be derived from these figures.
The new sales argument is not just NFL reach
Amazon uses sports rights to reach advertisers with and without an Amazon shop business. For retailers, the connection between store data, TV contact and later product search can be relevant. For companies that do not sell products on Amazon, live sports is instead a possible gateway to the larger DSP and its streaming and offsite reach.
According to an Amazon manager quoted by Digiday, the number of TNF advertisers rose six percent over the season so far. More than 50 brands are said to have won Amazon as an advertising client for the first time through live sports. These numbers are company information about customer acquisition, not an independently verified statement about additional advertising effect.
The reach base is considerable: Amazon Ads reported for the completed season 2025/26 an average of 15,3 million viewers per TNF game, 16 percent more than in the previous year. The comparability of seasons and measurement methods should be taken into account. The group states the 2025 viewers as 122,09 million different US people across all 15 games – not 122 million per match.
What the available effect figures actually show
The official Amazon Ads evaluation from February 2026 refers to three different data sources: Nielsen for viewer reach, EDO for later brand searches, and internal Amazon data for purchase behaviour. According to the EDO analysis, TNF advertising triggered brand searches 52 percent more often than advertising in other regular NFL games. Amazon also reports higher purchase rates for interactive ads and audience-specific delivery.
These metrics must not be blended into a single conversion rate. A search is not a purchase; a purchase after an ad contact has not automatically happened because of the advertising. A reliable assessment requires incremental sales, control groups, delivery reach, contact frequency, return effects and campaign costs. Our classification of measuring full-funnel retail media explains why a well-attributed order does not yet prove an additional order. How quickly NFL effect studies can be misunderstood is also shown by the EDO comparison of NFL advertising.
Update from 24 October: new advertisers and a Sony case study
An Adweek investigation from 23 October 2026 adds to the previously reported figure of six percent more TNF advertisers the structure of the customer base: according to Amazon, 17 percent of this season's advertisers are new to Thursday Night Football and Prime Video. This does not mean that 17 percent of all Amazon Ads customers were newly won; an independently verified sales effect of this advertiser group has not been published.
A useful measurement example comes from the previous season: In an official Amazon Ads case study on Sony Electronics, 65 percent of the campaign-attributed sales came from customers who had not previously bought Sony products through Amazon. For a timed in-game offer, Amazon reports twice the add-to-cart rate compared with Sony's other TNF games. 65 percent is a share of attributed revenue, not an uplift, and the comparison games are not a randomised control group. Amazon explicitly notes that the internal results relate to a single advertiser in 2025 and are not a forecast for other campaigns. The distinction between attribution and causal incrementality therefore remains crucial.
What is transferable to Germany
Thursday Night Football is a US rights and advertising environment. The US figures cannot be transferred one-to-one to German audiences or CPMs. The relevant pattern, however, is international: Amazon increasingly bundles sport, streaming, shopping data and programmatic. In its Q2 report from August 2026, the company reported 19,8 billion US dollars in quarterly revenue for Amazon Ads, 26 percent growth year on year. Amazon also reported that, measured internally, multi-sport campaigns reached a larger non-overlapping audience than campaigns with only one sport.
German advertisers should therefore not assume US football inventory, but instead check available Prime Video and other CTV inventory in their own market, document data sharing and plan a test against independent control groups. A look at Amazon's DSP and CTV strategy around Prime Big Deal Days shows the link with shopping events. The discussion about Amazon Ads Agent adds to the need for control when campaigns are automatically steered.
Assessment: Amazon has the organisational prerequisites to bring live sport and shopping closer together. Whether an additional euro in sports advertising works better than a euro in other channels remains a budget and measurement question per audience – not a blanket answer that can be derived from Colgate's case.
Image: Amazon Ads / Prime Video, official visual of the TNF coverage from a release dated 26. February 2026. It shows an earlier Black Friday football broadcast, not the Colgate campaign.
Sources: Digiday, 19.10.2026; Amazon Ads, 26.02.2026; Amazon, Q2-2026 classification.