If you haven’t gotten sick of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce taking over your football viewing experience yet, you’re in luck; with the Kansas City Chiefs set to face the Denver Broncos on Thursday Night Football, the football world’s fascination with “Traylor” will have a night to itself this week.
And while it has yet to be confirmed whether Swift will attend Thursday’s game at Arrowhead Stadium — she skipped out on the Chiefs’ win over the Vikings in Minnesota on Sunday after attending Kansas City’s previous two games — Amazon executives are preparing for the possibility and how it will affect their NFL on Prime broadcast.
“We’re preparing just like everybody else did. There’s a lot of conversation around it for sure,” Danielle Carney, head of NFL ads at Amazon, told AdWeek. “I am a Swiftie, and I’m an NFL fan, so for me it’s like the best of both worlds melding together.
Swift’s potential presence in Kansas City on Thursday would affect Amazon in multiple ways.
For one, as the ratings for the two games she previously attended this season have shown, any news of her presence would likely lead to a surge in demand for Thursday’s game. While the NFL on Prime experience has largely been a smooth one from a streaming standpoint, one would imagine that Amazon would want to have some technical safety rails in place in case Swifties all take over the app at the same time.
And then there’s the question of how much of the broadcast itself should be focused on Swift, especially if she’s visible in the stadium. Fox and NBC both received varying degrees of criticism for going all in on the Swift coverage while broadcasting the games she attended.
Where Swift’s potential attendance is most relevant to Carney is the effect it could have on the ads for the games. It will also be curious to see how much Swift’s upcoming concert movie — which is serendipitously being released on Friday — is promoted during the broadcast.
“We’ve been seeing some pretty strong demand coming out of the upfront. When we look at a game like Kansas City, we already know that demand was strong prior to the Swift Effect,” she told AdWeek. “But I’m sure once we get a little closer, we’ll start to see what we are planning.”
[AdWeek]
About Ben Axelrod
Ben Axelrod is a veteran of the sports media landscape, having most recently worked for NBC's Cleveland affiliate, WKYC. Prior to his time in Cleveland, he covered Ohio State football and the Big Ten for outlets including Cox Media Group, Bleacher Report, Scout and Rivals.