What Super Bowl? It Turns Out that the NFL’s Deal with Apple is Bigger than their Halftime Show
Let's be honest. Most people turn in to the Super Bowl for two things: commercials, and the halftime show. And
CELEB Magazine
Let's be honest. Most people turn in to the Super Bowl for two things: commercials, and the halftime show.
And it turns out, the partnership that the NFL has struck up with Apple may be bigger than the halftime show itself – making it a pretty big deal.
The NFL League is making changes to their future as the iPhone giant replaces Pepsi as the halftime show concert sponsor along with Amazon taking over Thursday Night Football.
Apple and the NFL Make Nice
As the NFL is still led by Roger Goodell, it is still the most controversial of all the major sports leagues for many reasons. With all of this stuff happening, the league finds themselves in deep business with big tech. Amazon is now a national media partner of the league with other companies wanting to work with them.
Their latest tech team-up is Apple. In the deal, people will see the Apple Music aspect become the official sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime show, replacing Pepsi after their decade long run.
This deal was set in place after the combination of the long effort by the NFL to not only turn the halftime show into a major revenue scheme, but to also expand its place in a cultural aspect as well. This deal with Apple is said be a five year, $50 million per year range kind of deal. As an NFL source told The Hollywood Reporter as the league was weighing its options last year, it was about finding a sponsor that could make the show “bigger … making it stand way outside of the 12 minutes.”
The league and Apple, with its global reach of about over tens of millions Apple Music subscribers, finally gets its chance to make the halftime show its now, with Rihanna being recently announced as the star of it this coming Super Bowl.
This Apple Music deal has been said to become one of the most important deals ever created by the league. On September 15th, for the first time, Amazon launched its Thursday Night Football package, the first time a national NFL rights deal was streaming-only. And July 25th, the league launched its own NFL+, which is meant to appeal to football superfans who may not have access to a TV.
Eyes on the Tech Sky for the NFL
Amazon has made a bet on the NFL worth billions with Thursday Night Football — and it’s paying off.
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) October 13, 2022
Apple is going all-in on sports streaming, too.@Ronenain joins @owenpoindexter on The Newsroom to discuss streaming giants and sports » https://t.co/noZlwHXnD8
( : @NetSuite) pic.twitter.com/mvd7vIgbo3
The deals with Apple and Amazon take over the league’s use of technology. Other media companies are of course in the competition of becoming just a big as these two companies.
For the NFL, which gets a vast majority of its revenue through rich contracts with broadcasters owned by Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox and Paramount, the appeal of tech companies is obvious: “They never have to get to profitability in their streaming business,” Needham and Co. analyst Laura Martin said Aug. 8 during a Yahoo event. “They can make a profit in some other part of their business that justifies them spending egregious amounts of money on sports rights.”
The NFL’s known broadcast partners are all spending an obscene more amount of money annually just to own rights to the games, along with millions more needed to produce and create and market them all at the same time. For a company like Fox or NBC, such an investment needs to be recouped. However, along with all of this, for Amazon, Apple or Google, turning a profit on live sports could be secondary to selling iPhones or Prime subscriptions, thus keeping users in their ecosystems.
Tech companies all around the world are desperately seeking to build up on their advertising and marketing aspects in order for them to keep customers.