Strategy
I’m back for 2026 after a short pause, working on a new website, a new pipeline of projects, and the same obsession: why brands do what they do.
So let’s talk about the Super Bowl LX halftime show.
The internet treated Bad Bunny’s performance like a cultural trophy. A victory lap. A statement. Depending on your feed, it was either progress or provocation. The NFL treated it like something far less romantic and far more useful: A business decision with a 13-minute runtime. The halftime show isn’t a concert. It’s the most expensive customer-acquisition slot in American media. And the NFL didn’t book Bad Bunny to “add flavour.” They booked him to add future. The numbers alone explain why.
Super Bowl LX averaged 124.9 million viewers across NBC platforms, with the game peaking at 137.8 million. And Bad Bunny’s halftime show drew 128.2 million viewers, meaning the performance slightly outpulled the game itself.
That’s not “entertainment programming.” That’s a mass-reach signal. One that says: this league is not just for who it used to be for.
And that’s the quiet strategic point everyone dances around: the NFL’s real opponent isn’t another sport. It’s time. Let me explain.
When your traditional audience ages, you don’t just risk losing viewership. You risk losing the habit. Live viewing softens. Social energy thins out. Sponsors start buying nostalgia instead of momentum. So the league has to keep recruiting, not just retaining.
Which forces one uncomfortable question: who is the next decade of the NFL?
In the United States, the most obvious answer is also the fastest-growing one: the Latino consumer: bigger, younger, and economically heavier than most people still intuitively grasp. And the NFL isn’t shy about this. In its own communications, the league cites more than 39 million Latino NFL fans in the U.S.
So booking Bad Bunny wasn’t “representation.” It was targeting done with the only language that truly scales: culture, broadcast at Super Bowl volume.
The numbers that make the strategy obvious: • Super Bowl LX audience: 124.9M average; 137.8M peak • Bad Bunny halftime audience: 128.2M • Telemundo effect: 3.3M average Spanish-language audience; 4.8M peak during halftime (records) • U.S. Latino population: 68M in 2024 (~20% of the U.S.) • Population growth engine: Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of total U.S. population growth between 2022–2023 • Economic weight: U.S. Latino GDP reported at $4.1T • NFL’s stated Latino fan base: 39M+
Now, here’s the part that makes this a proper strategy case study: targeting isn’t what you say. It’s where you spend the loudest money, and the halftime show is the NFL’s loudest money. And Bad Bunny is a very specific kind of “vehicle”: culturally anchored, globally famous, and fluent in the lived identity of an audience the league doesn’t just want to reach. It wants to keep.
That’s market orientation in the real world: you don’t lecture the market into loving you. You design your signals so the market sees itself in your world without having to ask permission.
It also explains why Telemundo’s numbers matter so much. A Spanish-language broadcast hitting record viewership during the halftime show isn’t just a “nice PR line.” It’s proof that the choice didn’t only create headlines, it shifted viewing behaviour in the exact direction the NFL needs.
And yes, the culture-war reactions were predictable. Reuters reported criticism from Donald Trump and conservative groups, plus an embarassing “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Kid Rock. Which, ironically, only underlined the original point: when you’re recruiting the next audience, backlash is often just proof your signal landed.
Now zoom out, because the NFL isn’t alone in this play.
Luxury has been learning the same lesson, painfully. Bain has said 50 million luxury consumers have “opted out” or been “forced out” of the luxury goods market in the last two years. Reuters also reported Bain’s warning that the luxury customer base fell from 400M in 2022 to 340M in 2025, and could lose another 20–30M buyers.
So what do luxury brands do when the old “aspirational escalator” starts breaking? They go hunting for growth audiences that aren’t just spending, but staying.
Another clean example: WWD reported Calvin Klein’s Bad Bunny campaign generated about $8.4M in Media Impact Value in under 48 hours (via Launchmetrics).
Different category. Same underlying strategic move: • Identify the growth engine. • Stop treating it like a “niche.” • Put it on the main stage, not the side stage.
Because the real job of the halftime show isn’t “wow me.” It’s simpler, more human, and more powerful: make me feel like this space is also mine, without making me translate myself to fit in.
Bad Bunny didn’t dilute Latino identity to be palatable. He scaled it.
And that’s the paradox brands still underestimate is that, specificity travels.
If you want the practical takeaway without the theory vocabulary, it’s this: Big brands don’t grow by “adding audiences.” They grow by rebuilding their default settings around who the future customer already is.
The NFL didn’t book a performer. It booked the next chapter of its own demand curve.
Stay strategic, my friends. Respect!
Hi — I’m João Ruas, senior marketing strategist and author of ABOUT STRATEGY. I write short, actionable pieces on market and brand strategy. Follow& Subscribe. Would love to connect.