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Like many Americans, I spectated the first-ever Black Friday NFL game yesterday.

It felt like we were celebrating Halloween on Christmas. Something was off.

Not because of the players on the fields or the points on the board.

But because I was watching the most well-oiled profit engine quietly pumping out billions of dollars right before my eyes, to the real winner of Black Friday.

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I’m talking about the Intergalactic Online Retail Juggernaut

On this year’s Blackest Friday, we bore witness to the fully packaged power of Amazon, on widescreen display, with every nut and bolt of its marketing machine firing hot on all cylinders.

While we sat on our couches at 3:00pm in the afternoon watching the Jets wilted by Dolphins, little did we know how deeply we were swimming in the frothy sea of flowing revenue.

The final revenue numbers are just being reported for this year, but it’s looking like Amazon will break its record again from last year. Amazon made a record $9.12 billion from last year’s Black Friday.

The greatest shock (beauty?) of Amazon’s Black Friday execution is Amazon paid $100M for the rights to air this first ever Black Friday game.

A quick back of the napkin ROI calculation on that shows Amazon earned $100 for every $1 they invested in the Black Friday game.

Not only that but consider also the day before the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game, where 77-year-old Dolly Parton showed up as a 27-year-old Dallas Cowboys cheerleader at half-time and stunned the internet, generating the third largest TV audience of any NFL regular season game. NFL games get a lot of attention.

So not only did Amazon further slow down Black Friday shopping for brick-and-mortar shops this year, it also caused shoppers to bunker down even more by giving them an NFL game to watch from their couch with a QR code on every commercial, so that viewers need only lift their probably-already-open phones in their hands a mere 15° to scan the ad on the TV and keep shopping.

Speaking of sitting on couches on our phones… Amazon knows its competing with Instagram, TikTok and YouTube on our phones. So what does Amazon do?

Amazon deploys its “TikTok” shopping app, joins YouTube and X in creator payouts game

“Shoppable Videos” is Amazon’s way of paying Influencers to create content and earn affiliate revenue from product videos.

This program isn’t new. Shoppable videos were first announced in 2021, and today, seeing video reviews on product pages is common. But what’s new is the mobile app experience, one that looks and feels very similar to TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

So Amazon officially joins every other social app, including most recently Reddit, releasing a vertical video scrolling social feed experience and X, deploying a way to compensate creators.

One influencer says he made $17,000 in 12 months after making 450 videos with Amazon Shoppable Videos.

Why this matters: Shoppable videos is Amazon’s bet to steal marketshare from the social media giants using its key strength over the others: shopping.

The takeaway for entrepreneurs: Ask yourself this question

“What’s Your Story Moment?”

A principle from one of the early employees at Loom, which I wrote about a few weeks ago when it sold to Atlassian for $975 million, comes to mind here.

The principle is this: build for the story moment. Loom says it builds features by imagining the customer experiencing the moment in their story.

Amazon’s Black Friday story moment is a perfect example.

Amazon’s marketing execs likely sat around a boardroom table and thought of a moment like this and spent hundreds of millions of dollars and years to make it happen:

“Imagine the customer. Still full from Thanksgiving. A day of feasting, football, and family conversations — now they woke up debating whether they should get in a cold car and drive to a crowded store to wait in lines, or just turn on the TV for another football game, open their phone to shop and scan commercials, and spend the day completing their Black Friday shopping from their couch.”

Let’s make that choice easy for them.”

A customer’s story moment is when the puzzle pieces of your marketing all come together into a perfect fitting moment, when every barrier to purchase is removed, and your customer sits back, smiles, and buys, buys, buys.

What’s your story moment?

It probably won’t look as picture perfect as Amazon’s Black Friday this year, but starts small, even if it’s just for a handful of customers, before you scale. If Dolly Parton can rock a Dallas Cowboys outfit performing a half-time show at age 77, you can make a story moment for your customers come true.

All the best,

Dave