Amazon wants to take some time out of NBC’s Super Bowl telecast to remind viewers to watch its new Thursday-night stream-casts next season without the use of linear TV.
The e-commerce giant will unveil during Super Bowl LVI a new logo for the mid-week NFL games to which it will have exclusive rights starting next season, and hopes viewers will recognize some hallmarks of the game – and some signals about the future of it. The new logo will debut in a Super Bowl ad crafted with independent agency Wieden + Kennedy.
The animated blue shield Amazon has created to represent “” uses elements of the shape of an old pigskin as well as Amazon’s signature “smile” logo, and should become a familiar symbol to football fans next season as the company threads the insignia through various aspects of production. Amazon secured rights to “Thursday Night Football” last year as part of an 11-year deal with the National Football League.
“As we move through time, we will start to have fun with it,” says Marc Patrick, Amazon’s global head of sports marketing, in an interview. “It’s very dynamic and it does a lot of things.” Amazon intends the shield’s motion and typeface to represent its interest in breaking boundaries and in redefining how people watch sports. The company already lets fans watch bespoke broadcasts with different announcers and use their Amazon Fire remotes to gain access to statistics. Amazon has already begun experimenting with interactive fan polling.
“We are carving out a stake in what we think the future of football could be,” says Ukonwa Ojo, global CMO of Prime Video and Amazon Studio, in an interview. “Our experience is going to be much more immersive than consumers are used to. We wanted to make sure that came to life.”
Amazon’s NFL pact gives it the ability to stream 15 regular-season games and one preseason game per year, and the company intends to deliver new pregame, halftime, and postgame shows as well as interactive features. There are growing expectations that Amazon will line up top announcing talent for the games in months to come.