From real‑time plays to real‑world sales: how brands win Amazon's live sports audiences

For years, TV audiences have been fragmenting. The shift from Linear TV to Streaming TV (STV) allows viewers to time‑shift shows, skip ads, and spread their attention across dozens of apps and devices. But live sports are an exception: they’re still one of the few places people show up together, in real time, on the biggest screen in the house. That makes the live sports audience different from almost everything else in your media plan, and worthy of a specific strategy:

• People choose to watch live, not catch up later.

• Co‑viewing is common with households, friends, and families watching together.

• Attention is higher and more focused, and moments are shared (“did you see that play?”) across group chats and social feeds.

Beyond the shift from Linear TV to STV, what has also changed is which publishers dominate the landscape, and how close the STV viewing experience can bring shoppers to a cart.

Why Amazon’s live sports ecosystem matters for brands

Over the past few years, Amazon has quietly become a major sports broadcaster. Thursday Night Football, women’s sports, global football, and other live events now run through Prime Video and Amazon’s broader video footprint. In many cases, they’re exclusive to Amazon. If fans want to watch, they have to watch through Prime.

That exclusivity is starting to show up in the numbers. Thursday Night Football on Prime now averages more than 15 million viewers per game across the full season, the highest in the 20‑year history of the TNF package. TNF’s reach on Prime has grown to more than 120 million unique viewers, up by over 50 million since 2022, and those viewers are nearly seven years younger on average than traditional broadcast and cable audiences. Even the shoulder content, TNF Tonight and TNF Nightcap, posted record audiences and year‑over‑year growth.

At the same time, Amazon has turned these broadcasts into shoppable environments with innovations in STV. A fan can see your ad on the TV, grab their phone, and find your product on Amazon in seconds. Over time, that path will get even shorter as more formats allow people to move from the TV screen straight into a shopping flow through QR codes and direct, on‑screen purchases made with the remote.

As a brand, you should be looking at STV as a way to plug into this viewing ecosystem where awareness, search, and purchase are almost instantly connected. And because Amazon’s live sports slate is both exclusive and growing (TNF plus women’s sports, global football, and more) you’re tapping into audiences you can’t reliably reach anywhere else. But connecting with the live sports audience requires nuanced tactics versus one broad STV plan or an STV strategy centered around a single major sporting event.

With Amazon, there’s a specific advantage to how you approach STV: you can tie exposure directly to sales through Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and use those insights to keep refining who you reach and what you show them.

That combination is hard to find elsewhere:

• Mass reach in a high‑attention environment (live sports on the biggest screen in the house)

• First‑party shopping signals attached to those viewers

• Direct paths to purchase, from QR and second‑screen behavior to onsite search and retail media, inside the same ecosystem

The rest of this piece is a practical playbook: how to make STV a performance engine in your Amazon retail media plan by reaching the right people with the right products, how to tie your efforts to sales outcomes with AMC, and how to turn ongoing sports viewership into long‑term value.

Getting in the game: treat Amazon Streaming TV as a performance channel

Investing in Amazon STV doesn’t need to replace your linear or traditional CTV buys. Its role is different:

• Reach high‑value shoppers while they’re watching live sports on Amazon

• Connect those impressions to what they later search, browse, and buy

• Feed those learnings back into the “always on” elements of your funnel

It’s common to treat STV as a “brand” line item in your media reporting. In reality, it should sit in your commerce performance plan. Because you can tie STV exposure to searches, baskets, and sales in AMC, Amazon STV becomes a full‑funnel performance channel, and not just a reach play.

A simple framework to approach this mindset is to build your STV strategy around the households and products that matter most to your P&L, then use AMC to prove what worked and where to go next. Here’s how.

Build your STV audiences around high‑value households

Not every live sports viewer is worth reaching for your brand. The win is to show up in front of the households that drive the most value over time. Clean rooms like AMC, paired with Flywheel’s Consumer Long‑Term Value dashboard, give you the behavioral proof to decide who is actually worth paying a premium to reach during live sports. Using Flywheel’s Consumer Long‑Term Value (CLTV) dashboard, you can easily visualize your high-value shopper cohorts and build audiences based on real, demonstrated shopping behavior such as:

• High long-term value households who come back repeatedly in your category

• Shoppers who trade up into premium lines, or who reliably buy higher‑margin packs

• Baskets that consistently include your products during past sports moments and tentpoles

From there, you can start to answer questions like:

• Which households are worth paying a premium to reach during live sports?

• Who tends to respond to “party” or “hosting” moments versus everyday snacking or mealtime?

• Which segments are most at risk of trading down to private label if you’re not present?

Once you know which households are worth reaching, you can prioritize them via AMC Audiences in your STV buys—not just for tentpole games, but across the full calendar. Amazon’s live sports audiences show up week after week, which means you can use historical data to build an always‑on, season‑long strategy instead of a one‑and‑done Super Bowl-worthy play.

Choose hero products that are built to win in a sports moment

With your high‑value audience strategy in place, the next question is: which products deserve the spotlight? Your default might be your Amazon “hero” SKUs, but live sports are where you want products that do two jobs: bring in high‑value new households and keep your existing customers coming back.

From our CLTV dashboard, you can analyze your Point of Market Entry (POME) products to find the ASINs that reliably pull in high‑value new‑to‑brand households while either defending share or lifting margins over time.

Selecting the right products begins with the basics: products that convert reliably on Amazon and have strong PDPs, ratings, and in‑stock performance. Our POME report within our Consumer Long-Term Value dashboard helps you go further by surfacing 1–2 of your point of market entry ASINs that:

• Bring in high‑value new‑to‑brand households who stick around, and

• Drive trade‑up, cross‑purchase, or larger baskets.

Getting even more specific to the live sports audience, these should be products such as:

• Value packs and multi‑packs that make sense for hosting and sharing

• Staple flavors, formats, or sizes that people recognize and go back to

• Premium or differentiated products that justify a higher basket and protect margin

Your STV investments work hardest when they highlight products you already know bring in high‑value new households and keep existing shoppers buying more often or trading up.

Carry momentum down the funnel with Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads

Seeing your brand during a live game is the spark, but most people won’t buy in the exact moment a spot airs. Those same high‑value sports households will show up later throughout the purchasing journey, from general browsing all the way to high-intent searches. Your job is to stay with them down the funnel, with Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads, so you turn that initial live sports exposure into repeat baskets and long‑term value. That means:

1. Using AMC insights to further refine your audience strategy post STV-exposure, following the logic of continuing to reach:

   1. “Exposed but didn’t buy” – households who saw your STV ads but didn’t purchase during the initial window

   2. “Exposed and purchased once” – people who tried you once and are primed for repeat

   3. “High‑value exposed households” – buyers whose baskets and historical CLTV justify more aggressive bids

2. Put those audiences to work via ADSP and Sponsored Ads: With an understanding of who has shown continued intent from your STV campaigns, you can use AMC Audiences for ADSP and AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads to make sure you’re reaching or bidding on high-intent shoppers, not just generic search terms.

The principle is straightforward: if someone saw you during the game, they should also see you when they search, scroll, and shop in the weeks that follow.

Closing the full-funnel loop with Amazon Marketing Cloud

A sustainable commerce strategy is one built on increasing your return on consumer over time, not just sales volume driven by short-term gains. The advantage you have with Amazon STV and a clean room such as AMC is that you can tie your full funnel marketing efforts directly to sales outcomes. With insights derived from AMC, you can look at:

• Incremental sales and new-to-brand (NTB) acquisition rates for households exposed to STV versus those who weren’t

• Repeat rates and basket size for shoppers first exposed during sports windows compared with other periods

• Long‑term value of cohorts that first interacted with you during live sports (Do they come back? Do they trade up?)

That season‑level view helps you make concrete decisions:

• How much should STV represent in your Amazon plan next year?

• Which audience and product combinations delivered the strongest incremental return?

• Where did STV outperform, or underperform, versus your other upper‑funnel investments?

STV measurement used to feel like a guessing game, but you’re now tying a historically “brand‑only” channel to actual retail outcomes in the same environment where people buy.

Instead of asking, “Did we get a lot of impressions during the game?” you can ask, “Which specific households and SKUs grew because of our STV strategy, and what should we do differently next season?” That’s what makes Amazon’s live sports footprint different.

It’s a unique cohort you can measure, optimize, and defend with data, and if you miss them, you’re leaving both sales and long‑term return on consumer on the table.

The takeaway: Amazon’s live sports audiences may be your best STV investment yet

While your overall STV strategy should be holistic, it’s worth pulling Amazon’s live sports audience out as its own line of thinking. These households don’t always overlap with your drama, romcom, or news viewers, and they’re often under‑reached if you run one generic STV play. They need their own segmentation, product exposure, and measurement strategy.

Live sports on Amazon are already where your shoppers are spending time, but reaching them effectively can feel daunting. Let’s connect to reach the right audiences with the right products, drive conversions, and truly measure the results of your STV efforts with AMC.