After the new deal was signed, Amazon made a plan for the first year of the partnership. The brand had two main objectives before the first season started:

1 - Create more awareness that Thursday Night Football now has a new home: Amazon Prime Video.

2 - Engage and create a meaningful relationship with an audience they never had before: football fans. But that wasn't going to be easy. Some of the most traditional and rabid fans feared that the big corporation could make unwelcoming changes to the game.

Instead of running away from the problem or trying to minimize it, we decided to make it bigger. Way bigger. For a few days, we purposefully turned football fans’ biggest nightmare into reality: we changed the game’s most sacred icon. To make the change even scarier, the new ball was inspired by the Amazon “smile” logo.

After a few days of madness online, Amazon revealed that Prime Video wasn’t changing anything on the game. The only change was where people watch it. The reveal increased the positive sentiment online, turning haters into fans and showing that Amazon was willing to bring more entertainment to their broadcast.

In the months leading up to the launch of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, Amazon collected data from its new football audience that showed that some football fans - the most conservative ones in their audience segmentation - were worried about what the giant corporation with no experience in football could do the game. While the “Digital Natives” fans were excited and looking forward to what the new streaming platform could offer on the broadcast, the most conservative “Football Fanatics” were reluctant. Amazon needed to start developing a relationship with both of them.

Many of those negative comments were happening online, so the brand needed to focus the engagement there.

Before creating the campaign, we created a new product. In partnership with Wilson, Amazon Prime Video developed a whole new football ball. We needed a ball inspired by the shape of the Amazon logo, but it still needed to be a working ball for the quarterbacks. The aerodynamics, size and weight were all elements that had to be taken into consideration. Because as part of our social campaign launch, we had planned to give the ball to the most famous quarterbacks in the NFL. They tried the ball during their training sessions. We filmed them and then used those videos as part of the campaign’s amplification.

Over 100 media outlets picked up the story. The social video announcing the new ball broke the record as the most viewed and commented video on Prime Video’s social history by 3X. The content about the new football was shared by creators, celebrities and influencers, such as Richard Sherman, Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, Deion Sanders, Dude Perfect, Lacey Taylor Rooks, Andrew Whitworth. The Prime Ball also helped the company to get a record number of new subscribers to Prime. But most importantly, it helped football fans finally realize that Amazon wasn’t here to change anything but just to bring more entertainment to the game they love.