Brand Rihanna Wins the Super Bowl
Published 16 February 2023
Rihanna’s Super Bowl 2023 Apple Music Halftime Show was about more than just pop credentials. The music, beauty and lingerie mogul delivered a marketing tour de force, including canny-meets-shameless product placement and a hefty slice of the insouciant cool her Gen Z fans adore – all while creating space to spotlight a milestone in disability representation.
The breakout star of the show, which unusually had no other musical guests, was Justina Miles, an American Sign Language interpreter whose energised performance galvanized viewers. A TikTok video showing her interpreting set opener ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ has already amassed 11 million views. Miles is the first deaf woman to provide signing interpretation during the Super Bowl halftime show, making it a watershed moment in deaf cultural representation.
It makes sense that Miles shone; Rihanna is now more producer than popstar – alongside being chief executive of Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin, she’s also the creative director of her lingerie label Savage x Fenty’s fashion show extravaganzas on Amazon Prime, which routinely ignite major social media discourse. By shifting some of the focus off herself as the main product (while still lending her star power), she's shown how celebrity status can be used to generate bigger conversations. Fans of her brands expect diversity and inclusion to be foregrounded, with disability representation increasingly important. For further insights, watch out for our All Abilities Macro Trend, publishing in April.
The energy of the performance could be summarised as ‘DGAFcore’ – the particular brand of coolness and nonchalance that makes Rihanna so popular with young audiences, who are deeply attuned to spotting inauthentic overenthusiasm, perceived as corporate sycophancy. ‘DGAF’ (short for the slang term ‘don’t give a fuck’) works as a persona in the era of parasocial (one-sided) relationships – such as following influencers on social media – as people seek to connect with celebrities who exude brusque relatability. But for a performance on the world’s biggest stage, this brand of ‘over it’ could represent a misunderstood opportunity. The slight air of cynicism complicated the enjoyment of fans who wanted to feel empowered and uplifted. Younger audiences tread a tightrope walk of irony and sincerity, but they also reward effort and crave entertainment that transcends the everyday – escapism is still very much in.
Rihanna’s choice to use the show to reveal her pregnancy offers another message about representation. Wearing Spanish fashion house Loewe – a brand with growing cultural cache among Gen Z – her announcement amounted to a rebuttal of old-fashioned attitudes about public pregnancy, especially towards those who dare to be provocative. Her fans loved it – indeed, some TikTokers are convinced the entire show was designed as a paean to the miracle of conception.
The standout success of Rihanna’s halftime show was a strong demonstration of the power of product placement. Savage x Fenty held a pop-up in Los Angeles to sell its football-themed attire, while Rihanna’s backup dancers wore the label’s bralettes. Meanwhile, Fenty Beauty produced an official NFL GameDay collaboration and ran a football-themed ad on TikTok. It’s now leveraging a clip of Rihanna using one of its products during the show, which reportedly earned the company $5m in media impact value (WWD, 2023). Primed to fuel excitement about the event online with behind-the-scenes footage, Fenty Beauty illustrated how to use a major entertainment event to one brand’s advantage.
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