In 2022, Amazon signed a 10-year-deal with the NFL, granting Prime Video the rights to stream Thursday Night Football exclusively on their platform. Prime Video, one of the latest entertainment streaming platforms to join the streaming wars, suddenly entered the world of sports and became a challenger brand in the segment, competing with Fox Sports, CBS, and ESPN. To create more awareness that Thursday Night Football had a new home, we launched not only a campaign but a whole new football ball.

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.

In the months leading up to the launch of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, Amazon collected data from its new football audience. On one side of the audience spectrum, the “Digital Natives” fans were excited and looking forward to what the new streaming platform could offer on the broadcast. On the opposite side, the most conservative “Football Fanatics” were very reluctant about the change. Amazon needed to start developing a relationship with them, proving that it was not here to change anything in the game - but to bring more entertainment. Many of those negative comments were happening online.

Instead of moving away from the problem, or trying to make it smaller, Amazon Prime Video decided to bring some entertainment to it. So we made the problem bigger. Way bigger. For a few days, we purposefully turned football fans’ biggest nightmare into reality: we changed the game’s most sacred icon – the football itself. To make the change even scarier, the new ball design 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. Just where people watch it. The reveal increased positive sentiment, turning haters into fans and showing that Amazon was willing to bring more entertainment to their broadcast.

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 considered. Because as part of our social campaign launch, we had planned to give the ball to the most famous quarterbacks of the NFL (Russel Wilson, Mathew Staford and Justin Herbert). They tried the ball on their training sessions, we filmed them - made the videos even more absurd - and then used them as part of the campaign’s amplification.

Over 100 media outlets picked up the story, and it all started with one social media post on Prime Video’s account. 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. Those posts were shared by creators, influencers, celebrities, and brands such as Richard Sherman, Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, Deion Sanders, Dude Perfect, Lacey Taylor Rooks, Andrew Whitworth, Wilson, NFL, and others. More than just turning haters into fans, the campaign turned haters into new subscribers for Prime. The Prime Ball helped to bring more Prime sign-ups than any other time in Prime Video's history - more than Prime Day.