Video-game adaptations continue to look like a cheat code for high streaming viewership.

Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of the video-game series Fallout, released on April 10, quickly became the streamer’s second-most-watched title of all time, clocking over 65 million viewers in its first 16 days, according to the company.

The post-apocalyptic series, which has already been greenlit for a second season, is the latest example in the streaming world of a successful video-game adaptation. Last year, HBO original series The Last of Us quickly became one of the platform’s most-watched shows, while Netflix’s The Witcher—based on a series of fantasy novels by Andrzej Sapkowski that were first adapted into a video-game series—was Netflix’s most-watched original Season 1 release when it first debuted in late 2019.

For Prime Video, the series was the highest-profile release yet on its ad-supported tier, which rolled out widely to US Prime Video users in January, and there was plenty of marketing might to support the series. Amazon leaned heavily on experiential activations aimed at the gaming community, and were able to reel in not just viewers, but also advertisers interested in jumping in on the action.

“This was a pretty robust marketing campaign where we used a lot of different levers to both connect with fans who are familiar with the game, either gamers who played the game or gamers in general who may not have played Fallout, but were familiar with the IP,” Jared Goldsmith, head of series marketing at Amazon MGM Studios, told Marketing Brew.

Continue reading here.—JS

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In January, with the flip of a switch, Amazon’s Prime Video became the largest ad-supported streaming platform in the US, its executives announced Tuesday during the company’s first upfront presentation.

Its message to the advertising industry was clear: size matters.

Within the first five minutes, Mike Hopkins, Amazon’s SVP of ads, noted that Prime Video has an average ad-supported reach of 115 million monthly viewers in the US. For comparison, Netflix said earlier this year that it had 23 million monthly active users on its ad tier worldwide.

Even before introducing ads, Amazon was a formidable streamer, with its viewership in terms of total time spent falling just below YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, per Nielsen. Amazon’s inaugural upfront was everything one might expect would wow Madison Avenue, with celebrities (hello, Jake Gyllenhaal), musical performances (good morning, Alicia Keys), and awkward one-liners delivered by executives in suits.

But Amazon ain’t like the other platforms, and its execs know it. “Here’s the critical difference—we’re not just an entertainment company trying to monetize our shows with the latest ad tech or third-party audience signals,” Tanner Elton, Amazon’s VP of US ad sales, said. “We’re the place those customers come to shop and do so much more, which means we can do things nobody else can do.”

Amazon is the OG retail media network, while its ad tech leverages “billions of customer signals,” Paul Kotas, Amazon’s SVP of ads, said. As actress Keke Palmer pointed out onstage, ads can also be retargeted across Amazon’s other ad-supported properties, including Twitch, Amazon Music, Amazon Live, and FAST channels.

How this inventory will be bundled and priced is for advertisers and Amazon to haggle over, but buyers that Marketing Brew spoke to expect the new offerings from Amazon and growth on Netflix to soften the ad market.

Read more here.—RB

It’s a good time to be playing women’s college sports.

Not only did this year’s women’s March Madness final see higher viewership than the men’s final for the first time, but women college athletes are now also seeing about even distribution of NIL deals as men, according to a report from SponsorUnited.

Girls club: Of the top 100 athletes based on number of NIL deals in 2023, 52% are women and 48% are men, according to SponsorUnited’s 2023-2024 NIL Marketing Partnerships report.

• In 2022, that split was 38% women, 62% men.
• Volleyball and softball largely drove the growth.
• The number of players from those two sports who made the top 100 list doubled from six in 2022 to 12 in 2023.

Basketball, though, is still dominant: 35% of women’s NIL deals are in that sport, compared to 18% in gymnastics and 15% in volleyball. Women’s basketball outranked men’s basketball in terms of average deals per athlete, with women’s basketball deals up 60% from 2022 to 2023.

Women’s volleyball saw the most growth in average number of deals per athlete from 2022 to 2023, with the number of volleyball deals doubling in the past year, according to the report. That’s thanks, in part, to recent Southern Methodist University graduate Alex Glover, who activated 41 deals in the past 12 months compared to eight the year prior. Volleyball has also shown signs of sponsorship growth at the professional level in the US recently.

Keep reading here.—AM

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