Amazon Thinks You Should Spend Black Friday Watching a Football Game Full of QR Codes. It Just Might Work

Television rights for the NFL are complicated. The NFL makes a lot of money parceling out its games to the different television and cable networks. Then there’s Sunday Ticket, which you can buy as a part of YouTube TV. Oh, and there’s Amazon, which paid $1.2 billion per season to show the Thursday night game each week. 

Well, except this week, because this week is Thanksgiving, and the three NFL games are already spoken for by the broadcast networks. The chance that any of them would give up their traditional Thanksgiving game to Amazon’s streaming service is exactly zero. Again, there’s a lot of money involved. 

Not only is football on Thanksgiving a tradition, but it also happens to have a mostly captive audience, considering there isn’t much else to do on a day when everything else is closed. That means there’s a lot of money to be made showing ads to all of those post-thanksgiving dinner fans.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to shine some attention on itself, Amazon convinced the NFL to do something it’s never done before–play a game on the Friday after Thanksgiving, also known as Black Friday. Amazon, because it’s Amazon, isn’t content just showing you a football game. This, of course, is a marketing opportunity. And, so, if you watch the game, in addition to football, you’ll see QR codes that you can scan to buy things from, well, Amazon of course. 

When you think about it, the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. Even if you think a football game on the day after Thanksgiving is a thing people need in their life, filling the game with “exclusive retail deals revealed throughout the game,” as Amazon describes them, feels like a bit much. It feels just a little opportunistic.

Then again, the entire business model for the NFL is capturing your attention. “We get up and go to bed at night asking people to look at us,” Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner, told The Washington Post earlier this year. If you’re the world’s largest online retailer, having people look at you is a good place to start. 

The game will be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, free to anyone with an Amazon account–even if you don’t subscribe to Prime. I’m sure Amazon would love for some number of people who watch the game to think “Huh, I’d like to see more NFL games, maybe I should subscribe to Prime.” I have no idea if that’s realistic, but there’s a much bigger benefit for the company.

If Amazon can convince you to stay home and watch football on Prime Video, you’re not out Shopping at Best Buy, Target, or Macy’s. And, if the game highlights things you can buy on Amazon simply by scanning a QR code, the online retailer can leverage all of those people paying attention to football to shift some of their Black Friday shopping to Amazon. 

It was only a few years ago that Coinbase ran its famous “QR code” ad, which included a QR code bouncing around a rotating color background. The ad was a viral hit partly because you had no idea what the ad was for if you didn’t scan the code, and partially because QR codes were just becoming. Previously, they had mostly been confined to stickers on tables as a way for restaurants to avoid handing out paper menus during the pandemic. 

Amazon is about to find out just how far it can push as it attempts to blend commerce with America’s favorite pastime. More importantly, it’s about to find out whether there’s room for another holiday sports tradition on a day traditionally reserved for shopping. If anyone can do that, I think we can all agree it’s Amazon.