The NFL’s halftime show mistake: When the best customer you have isn’t enough

By SUZANNE DOWNING

The NFL isn’t merely a football league. It is, in many ways, the most sophisticated marketing machine in American life, and perhaps in the history of the world.

No other sports organization even comes close. The NFL doesn’t simply sell tickets, it sells ritual, culture, scarcity, identity, belonging.  Seventeen regular season games per team, and every one of them is a huge event. The league has turned football into a 365-day cultural product, a national campfire that never goes out.

It dominates television. It dominates advertising. It dominates the American calendar.

Which is why what happened at the Super Bowl halftime show this year is so remarkable.

Bad Bunny’s performance wasn’t simply edgy, provocative, and profane. It was grotesquely sexualized, aggressively politicized, and completely out of step with the audience that made the NFL what it is.

So the question practically asks itself: How does the smartest marketing organization in sports forget the oldest rule of business?

That rule is: The best customer you will ever have is the one you already have.

Somewhere along the way, the NFL decided it wasn’t enough to be the most watched, most profitable, most culturally dominant sports league in America. It decided it needed something else. A different audience, a trendier audience, a more “modern” audience.

In other words, it decided it could trade in its core fans for a new market.

The NFL has built its empire on a unique formula: centralized control, shared revenue, premium scarcity, and storytelling that never stops. The league generates more than $23 billion annually and is on track toward $25 billion within a couple of years. Media rights alone bring in around $12 billion a year. Brands pay top dollar because NFL exposure actually moves the needle. It drives searches, purchases, cultural attention.

The Super Bowl is the advertising gold standard for a reason.

For the league to turn the halftime show into something that feels more like a urban nightclub act than a national celebration is downright tone deaf and bizarre.

It’s the corporate equivalent of burning down your own house.

Bud Light made the same mistake. They assumed their loyal customer base was replaceable and that  branding was about chasing the newest trans trend  rather than respecting the people who were already buying the product. They went cultural activist instead of cultural anchor.

The NFL appears to be running the same experiment: We can afford to alienate the old crowd because we’ll attract a new one.

Maybe, but maybe not, NFL geniuses.

When you inject a halftime spectacle that feels intentionally transgressive, you are not “expanding the brand.”

The NFL seems to believe it can stand above its audience, lecture its audience, remake its audience. But that’s not how this works. The NFL didn’t become the king of American sports by acting like it hated America. It became the king by understanding America better than anyone else.

Which makes this mistake all the more telling. When you’re on top, the temptation is always the same: You stop appreciating the base that got you there and start chasing the fringe.

The NFL went “Bud Light.” We’ll see how that works out.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan who attended Super Bowl XXXIX.