What Bad Bunny’s $1,000 Super Bowl Fee Teaches Marketers About Earned Media

The $1,000 halftime show

When the news broke that Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance came with a fee of just $1,000, the internet had predictable reactions. Outrage. Disbelief. Memes. How could one of the biggest artists in the world perform for less than most wedding bands charge?

But if you zoom out, the economics make perfect sense. The NFL covers all production costs, often running into the tens of millions for staging, choreography, and broadcast integration. The artist receives something far more valuable than a paycheck: an audience of 120+ million viewers, all watching at the same time.

Bad Bunny didn’t need the money. He needed the moment. And that moment translated into streaming spikes, album sales, tour ticket demand, and cultural relevance that no amount of paid media could replicate.

The exposure trade-off is real

Marketers love to mock the phrase “we’ll pay you in exposure.” And rightfully so, in most contexts, it’s a bad deal. But the Super Bowl halftime show is one of the rare cases where exposure actually is the payment, and it’s worth exponentially more than any fee.

This is the principle behind earned media at its highest level. You invest something, whether it’s effort, talent, or a token fee, and the platform amplifies you in ways you could never buy directly.

Consider the numbers:

• 120+ million live viewers in the US alone
• Billions of social media impressions in the days following
• Weeks of media coverage, interviews, and cultural discourse
• Permanent association with one of the most prestigious stages in entertainment

No advertising budget in the world can buy that kind of simultaneous, undivided attention. A single 30-second Super Bowl ad costs over $7 million. Bad Bunny got 15 minutes for $1,000.

This mirrors how the best marketing channels work

The Super Bowl halftime dynamic mirrors exactly how earned media works in digital marketing. The best channels aren’t the ones where you pay per impression. They’re the ones where you invest effort and quality, and the returns compound over time.

Organic search is the clearest parallel. You don’t pay Google to rank. You invest in content quality, technical infrastructure, and entity authority. When it works, the visibility compounds. A single well-optimized page can generate traffic for years, whereas a paid ad stops the moment the budget runs out.

At FreshBooks, we built an organic program that generated $30M in ARR. That didn’t happen by buying traffic. It happened by building systems that earned attention at scale, by creating content so useful and authoritative that Google couldn’t ignore it.

Vector SEO and AI visibility: the new earned media

The parallel extends even further into the emerging world of AI-generated answers. With Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and other LLM-powered interfaces becoming primary information sources, a new form of earned media is emerging.

You can’t buy your way into an AI-generated answer. There’s no ad unit for LLM citations. You earn your way in through entity authority, content quality, structured data, and the kind of topical depth that makes AI models confident enough to cite you.

This is what I call the visibility stack: the combination of entity SEO, content authority, and technical infrastructure that positions a brand to be visible not just in traditional search results, but in AI-generated answers, knowledge panels, and conversational interfaces.

Just like Bad Bunny earned his 15 minutes on the world’s biggest stage, brands need to earn their place in the AI-generated information layer. The investment isn’t monetary. It’s strategic.

Proof that timely takes generate outsized visibility

Here’s where this gets personal. When the Bad Bunny fee story broke, I shared my perspective on LinkedIn, connecting the dots between entertainment economics and marketing strategy. That post was featured by LinkedIn News as a Top Perspective in the article “Bad Bunny’s small pay for the Big Game,” edited by Megan McDonough.

I didn’t pitch LinkedIn News. I didn’t pay for placement. I shared an insightful take at the right moment, and the platform amplified it because the perspective added value to the conversation.

That’s earned media in action. The same principle that made Bad Bunny’s $1,000 performance worth millions in exposure made my LinkedIn post reach an audience I never could have accessed through paid promotion alone.

The takeaway for marketers: build systems that earn attention

The lesson isn’t that you should work for free. It’s that the most valuable visibility can’t be purchased. It has to be earned.

For marketers, this means:

• Invest in organic infrastructure. Build the content, technical foundation, and entity authority that compounds over time. At Newfold Digital, we expanded query visibility 20X by building data infrastructure first, not by increasing ad spend.
• Position for AI visibility. The next frontier of earned media is being cited by AI models. That requires entity authority, structured data, and content that demonstrates genuine expertise.
• Be timely with your expertise. Cultural moments create windows where your professional perspective can reach massive audiences. The investment is your insight and your willingness to share it publicly.
• Think in systems, not transactions. Paid media is transactional. Earned media is systemic. Build the system, and the visibility takes care of itself.

Bad Bunny understood something that many marketers still don’t: the biggest returns don’t come from negotiating a higher fee. They come from showing up on the right stage, with the right performance, at the right time. The $1,000 was irrelevant. The 120 million viewers were everything.

Build systems that earn attention. The compounding returns will dwarf anything you could buy.

Krinal MehtaDirector of SEO, Newfold Digital