TPUSA vs Bad Bunny: Did the NFL Adopt the Bud Light Strategy?

Full disclosure: I did not watch the Bad Bunny halftime show. The hosts of the Super Bowl party I attended provided several televisions in multiple rooms, a couple of which ran the NBC feed at halftime, with the rest running the Turning Point USA YouTube show. No one bothered with the official halftime, but to be fair, not too many people paid much attention to either – or to the game itself. 

I did watch the alternative All-American Halftime Show on one of the TVs, the counterprogramming provided by TPUSA, and was very impressed with its production values. (It’s embedded at the end if you missed it.) Like most halftime shows, I didn’t know most of the acts, but I found them entertaining. And I was hardly alone in that choice, as the Daily Wire reports today. Millions of viewers left the Super Bowl to watch the first serious challenge in decades to the NFL’s monopoly on Super Bowl Sunday entertainment:

The TPUSA All-American Halftime Show outperformed all expectations, with an incredible 6.1 million people tuning in to watch on the YouTube livestream, another 1 million watching on Charlie Kirk’s YouTube, and “monster” numbers on other partner sites streaming it including Rumble and DailyWire+.

Social media lit up with fans celebrating the Super Bowl halftime show alternative, and later with viewers proud of how many people turned up and tuned in. …

The lineup for “The All-American Halftime Show” was announced last week. Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett took the stage in a show meant to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.

“We’re approaching this show like David and Goliath,” Kid Rock said in a statement, as The Daily Wire previously reported. “Competing with the pro football machine and a global pop superstar is almost impossible, or is it? He said he’s having a dance party, wearing a dress, and singing in Spanish? Cool. We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.”

Bad Bunny apparently didn’t show up in a dress yesterday, but he and the NFL made their politics and criticism for America plain before and during the show. Whether or not that impacted the ratings remains to be seen, but Outkick put the intent of the show into a reasonable, rational framework:

The show turned the halftime show at the All-American game into something international. Something, yes, foreign.

But it also spoke to the inarguable fact that Hispanics make up an estimated 20% of the country.

This show was not America First. It wasn’t nationalist. 

It was internationalist.

That seems like a fair assessment, and not particularly emotional or partisan. Roger Goodell and the NFL want to expand the appeal of the league to international audiences, having saturated the American audience potential. Offering a Spanish-language halftime show would showcase the NFL’s outreach to Latin America, which might have been far less controversial had that been the extent of the messaging.

Jim Geraghty makes a great point about the strategy, but that point prompts a comparison to another marketing strategy:

As far as we can tell, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell aspires to the status of Alexander the Great, to one day gaze upon “the breadth of his domain, and weep, for there are no more worlds to conquer.” (Yes, pedants, I know there’s no evidence that Alexander actually said it.) But now the NFL has maximized its level of interest, television audience, and revenue from people who like watching the game, a.k.a., watching the most amazing touchdown catch they’ve ever seen in their lives waved off by the referees who concluded an offensive lineman was an ineligible man downfield because he stepped more than one yard past the line of scrimmage. Or watching the referees convene a Council of Trent to determine when the receiver had full possession of the ball.

In search of new worlds to conquer, Goodell is determined to make his league important, relevant, and worth following among the portion of the population that doesn’t like football. …

Whether we football fans like it or not, Goodell and the league are going to continue trying to sell the game to people who aren’t that into football. Next year, the NFL is going to play nine regular season games in overseas stadiums — in Melbourne, Australia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Paris, France; Munich, Germany; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City, Mexico; and three games in London, England. I’m not sure the players and coaches love the idea of traveling halfway around the globe for a game, nor the fans who lose out on another home game. But the league and its owners make a fortune in merchandise, television rights, once-a-year ticket opportunities, and so on.

Goodell, seemingly with the consent of the owners, is determined to turn the NFL into a global game, and that doesn’t just mean geographically; he means across all demographics and corners of society.

That is true, but it’s one thing to expand the reach and another entirely to insult your existing consumer base in doing so. Bud Light chose the latter and lost significant market share in the process. Target, Jaguar, and perhaps especially Gillette suffered similar fates by “going woke” and lecturing their audiences about their WrongThink. Bud Light only did that through Alyssa Heinerscheid’s public commentary; Gillette put that lecturing in its advertising, with devastating results. 

The NFL didn’t just play to international viewers in Latin America with Bad Bunny’s show. They played to the progressive Left around the world with Bad Bunny’s political messaging for months leading up to the show, complete with lecturing Americans about immigration enforcement that worked its way into the act. In a country where immigration enforcement has majority support and deportation of criminal illegal aliens is N 80/20 issue, that is a deliberate choice to insult the “saturated’ core audience on which the NFL chiefly relies for revenue. And the NFL has done that for nearly a decade with various other social-justice messaging, too, especially during the Colin Kaepernick years. 

Will it damage the NFL? Unlike Bud Light and Gillette, NFL football doesn’t have significant competition. It is its own market; consumers may opt out, but they don’t have a handy substitute. That, however, is not the case when it comes to the halftime show, which TPUSA proved for the first time yesterday. TPUSA marshaled considerable resources to stage a respectable counter-programming against the NFL’s woke show, and drew enough eyeballs away from NBC for advertisers to take notice. If and when TPUSA stages this in February 2027, the ad rates for halftime advertising may have to come down in response, especially if TPUSA adds more high-profile acts that the NFL has largely ignored.

If you missed the TPUSA All American Halftime Show yesterday, here’s the full show. There’s no Pedro Pascal, but that’s a plus rather than a minus. 

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