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The Super Bowl halftime show is a piece of Americana that draws more than 100 million viewers, making it the marquee musical performance of the year. The most-watched halftime show in history was Michael Jacksons 1993 performance at Super Bowl XXVII, which drew 133.1 million viewers. Last years show featuring Usher and a cast of surprise guests drew 123.4 million. So when Kendrick Lamarthe 22-time Grammy Award winner, who last week took home five awards for his song Not Like Ustakes the stage for the Super Bowl LIX halftime show, theres a chance it will register among the most-watched ever. And none of it would have been possible if not for a bold decision by Fox and its sketch comedy show, In Living Color, more than 30 years ago, which changed the Super Bowl halftime show forever. From marching bands to “Elvis Presto” For the first 20-plus Super Bowls, the halftime show was a bathroom break bridging the two halves of the gamea nonevent at best, and at its worst, cringeworthy. The first Super Bowl halftime show in 1967 featured the University of Arizona and Grambling State University marching bands, along with trumpeter Al Hirt. Marching bands were a mainstay throughout the ’70s and ’80s with themed events peppered in, including a Salute to the Caribbean (1979), a makeshift flash mob doing synchronized Jazzercise (1988), and a strange tribute to the Peanuts comic strip (1990). The halftime show may have reached peak cringe in 1989 when it brought us Elvis Prestohalf Elvis impersonator, half magicianfor a borderline-creepy display of bad music, worse dancing, and what was billed as the worlds largest card trick. Members of the University of Arizona marching band perform on the field during the halftime show at Super Bowl I (then called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game) between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, January 15, 1967. [Photo: Robert Riger/Getty Images] With this kind of track record, the Super Bowl routinely lost most of its audience during halftime, something the NFL had come to accept as normal. Fox’s audacious bet During a routine staff meeting in 1991, as legend has it, despite CBS owning the exclusive Super Bowl rights, Fox president Jamie Kellner saw an opportunity. He proposed an audacious idea: counterprogram against the Super Bowl halftime show, television’s most predictable dead zone. Jamie started talking about how nobody watches the halftime,” Dan McDermott, then a Fox programming executive, said. He said, We should do a live episode of In Living Color. Well make a big deal out of it. We’ll convince America to turn the channel at halftime.'” For a network billing itself as the “Bad Boys of Television,” it was a perfectly on-brand act of disruption. In Living Color creator Keenen Ivory Wayans agreed. I thought, This is genius, he said. The Super Bowl was the biggest thing in television. No one would dare take on the Super Bowl. We have to do that. Fox’s plan was floated by a $2 million infusion from sponsor Frito-Lay, though the brand was nervous about potential live TV mishaps sparking controversy. To counter this, Fox agreed to air the show on a slight delay. It then launched an aggressive marketing campaign, flooding airwaves with promos and turning its studio into a star-studded party venue to host the live event. All that was left to do was see what the NFL had on deck for the Super Bowl XXVI halftime show to know what they were up against. How to steal 29 million viewers The NFL walked right into Foxs trap. The 1992 halftime show theme was “Winter Magic,” featuring figure skaters Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill performing on tiny portable rinks while surrounded by dancers in snowflake costumes and a 30-foot inflatable snowman. It was yet another tone-deaf production that didn’t appeal to NFL fans in any way. Viewers tuned out en masse, flipping over to catch In Living Colors Super Halftime Party. Nearly 29 million viewersabout 11% of the Super Bowl’s total audienceswitched over to watch the Wayans brothers, Jim Carrey, and the rest of the iconic sketch comedy team perform Super Bowl-related skits, taking aim at football culture. [Screenshot: 20th Century Fox] In the bottom left corner of the broadcast, Fox posted a clock counting down to the second half, so viewers didnt have to flip back over to CBS to check the game status. This kept viewers engaged throughout the show. The birth of the modern Super Bowl halftime show The NFL didnt even acknowledge Foxs viewership heist. It did, however, resolve to never let it happen again. In 1993, for Super Bowl XXVII, the league tapped Michael Jackson to perform at halftime. From there, they featured Prince, Madonna, Beyoncé, Bruno Mrs, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Usher . . . and the list goes on. Today, the Super Bowl halftime show is one of the greatest spectacles in musica badge of honor worn by the worlds greatest acts. So if youre one of the 100 million-plus viewers looking forward to Kendrick Lamar performing at this years halftime show, you can thank Keenen Ivory Wayans, the Fox brass, and the team at In Living Color for pulling one over on the NFL.
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E-Commerce
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the National Football League sought to send a statement about its engagement with issues around race and diversity. In fact, it ended up sending two statementsand together, they come off as conflicting messages. On the one hand, commissioner Roger Goodell reaffirmed the leagues diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts aimed at goals such as increasing the number of non-white coaches, despite the recent wave of DEI pullbacks announced by businesses from Target to McDonalds to Meta, not to mention the Trump administrations noisy demonization of such policies. I believe that our diversity efforts have led to making the NFL better, Goodell said at his Super Bowl news conference this week. Its attracted better talent. We think were better if we get different perspectives, people with different backgrounds, whether theyre women or men or people of color. We make ourselves stronger and we make ourselves better when we have that. And on the other hand, just one day later, The Athletic reported that the NFL would remove the End Racism messaging that has been stenciled over the back of the end zones in Super Bowl games since 2021. (This year, the end zone messages will be It Takes All of Us and Choose Love.) Even critics who acknowledge that an end zone stencil is little more than a gesture nevertheless complained that removing it was a capitulation designed to avoid the wrath of Trump, who is scheduled to attend the game. [Photo: Ryan Kang/Getty Images] The tension between these two messages isnt a triviality for the NFL, a true mass brand that presides over one of the few remaining tentpole events in the U.S., regularly attracting an audience of 100 million or more. As both a brand and a business, the league has been grappling with issues of race and diversity long before the current DEI debate. Some of the diversity efforts Goodell was talking about came about precisely because of a very notable dearth of Black coaches and general managers. Among other policies, the so-called Rooney Rule, implemented in 2003, requires teams to interview minority and female candidates for coaching and other positions. (It is named after Dan Rooney, the Pittsburgh Steelers owner who was head of the leagues diversity committee at the time.) Opinions on the effectiveness of this and other NFL diversity efforts are mixed. The league says 53% of league and team staffs are women and minorities, and half of last years eight head-coach openings were filled by non-white candidates. But of seven more recent head-coach openings, only one is expected to be filled by a Black coach. And some minority-candidate interviews are viewed as basically performative gestures by teams who have already made a decision. A little more than a quarter of head coaches are minority males, compared to about 70% of players. While that progress may be limited, the hiring rules at least acknowledged the legitimacy of the underlying issue. Similarly, when the league first used the End Racism stencil not long after the slaying of George Floyd, it may have been just a gesture, but it was one that acknowledged racism as an ongoing issue. A few years earlier, then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthemto protest exactly the kind of brutality that later took Floyds lifeturning the NFL into a culture-war forum. (Trump famously said protesting players were SOBs who should be tossed off the field.) At a minimum, the league sought to project an image that embraced diversity. On-field protests have faded, but the rhetorical attacks on public diversity efforts and messaging has only gotten louder. America First Legal, an organization founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has pointed to the Rooney Rule as an example of anti-meritocratic discrimination in the employment process. If we can take Goodell at his word, the NFL is unmoved by this argument. Were not in this because its a trend to get in or a trend to get out of it, he said at the news conference this week, referring to the leagues DEI work. Our efforts are fundamental in trying to attract the best possible talent into the National Football League, both on and off the field. Meanwhile, a league spokesman told The Athletic that the shift in the end zone messages is simply a response to recent tragedies including the California fires, New Orleans terror attack, and fatal Washington, D.C., air collision. But its hard not to see it as at least partly a response to the political climate (and, uh, notably, conservatives have baselessly implicated DEI policies in both the fires and the air collision). The upshot is a muddled message that seems less like a committed game plan, and more like a punt.
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E-Commerce
Zoom made a name for itself during the pandemic, becoming synonymous with video conference calls. But the company recently changed its name from “Zoom Video Communications Inc.” to simply “Zoom Communications Inc.,” a sign that its pushing beyond video. Other Zoom offerings include a Team Chat product comparable to Slack, a collaborative document platform that integrates with Zoom meetings, business phone features, and an AI companion. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan spoke to Fast Company about the company’s offerings and ambitions beyond video, his vision for the future of AI-powered work, and what the return to the office has meant for how people use Zoom. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. You recently dropped “video” from your company name. What does that mean for the future of Zoom? When I started Zoom in 2011, the mission was very simple: to make video communication frictionless. And that’s pretty much what we did. So, when we started, everything centered around video. Now, you look at what we’re doing today: Way beyond video, we have a full workplace platform. We have Zoom Phone, Contact Center, Team Chat, Whiteboard, Zoom Docs. Essentially, our new mission is to build an AI-first work platform for human connection. It’s not only centered around video anymore. And what role is AI going to play in all that? Before everyone talked about generative AI, we already heavily invested into AIsome traditional AI and some generative AI. We have a smart team and built our own large language model as well, even before ChatGPT. Today, I open up my Zoom Workplace and I still spend a lot of time to manually do so many things. I check my email, look at my channel messages, phone calls, calendars, meetings, and sometimes I need to write in meeting notes. A lot of manual work. I think AI can completely change that. Essentially, AI will become my personal assistant. As a step one, to free up a lot of time and make my work more productive and help coordinate so many thingsbooking travel and managing travel plans, making scheduling meetings much easier, leveraging agentic technology to improve productivity. Step two is even more interesting. We all work for five days a week. I think in the next 10, maybe 15 years, I think the four-day working week might become a standard because of AI technology. Step two of digital assistant technology is more like my digital twin. A personal large language model with my personal contacts, knowledge, skills, and everything. I can even send my digital twin to join a meeting. Say you and I are working on a contract. You and I need to look at all the terms, negotiate, spend hours, days, or weeks to finalize the contract. In the future, I send my digital twin, you send your digital twin, and we let them work together and come up with a preliminary contract and just sign off. Plenty of companies are working on AI, office software, and video conferencing. What sets Zoom apart? I think on many fronts we definitely differentiate ourselves. One thing is our innovation velocity. We stay very close with the customers, really understand their pain points, to be the first one to come up with a solution. Number two is really about our philosophy. We want to build a project that just works. When you look at our customers, when they’re using Zoom versus competitors’ products, their feedback is, I really enjoy using Zoom because it’s a very simple intuitive experienceno learning curveand any network environment and all kinds of devices, it just works. The third thing is really about AI. We just finished our Q4 and we’re working on creating our quarterly board slide deck. Quite a few team members have to get all the information from all our systems and work on our slidesmany days work just to get a quarterly slide deck. What if we leveraged AI and could tell the AI, please create our Q4 slide deck? The AI agent will take action proactively, look at all the systems, grab the information and our board slide deck template and create slides automatically. It used to be every meeting, our chief of staff would write down all the notes and create a Zoom Doc to share. Today, we leverage Zoom AI and, after each meeting is over, we automatically create Zoom Docs with all the action items and insights, and also leveraged our agent to create some tasks assigned to me or assigned to you. It’s a kind of AI-first experience. How has the return to the office affected how people are using Zoom? First of all, the way they use the conference room is very different. Prior to COVID, say you and I joined from a conference room, and some people joined remotely, probably they’re in listening mode, because the conversation is driven by the people in the conference room. Now, it’s very different. Even if people join remotely, they want to have the same experience as the ones sitting in the conference room. Let’s say there are five people in the conference room. From the remote side, they want to see each of those people. The conference room experience is different, and we are much better positioned than other competitors. Another change is, when you work remotely, there’s probably more conferencing meetings and phone calls. Now that it’s back to the office, especially for internal meetings, sometimes it’s just a walk to your desk or your office, and we can talk. Asynchronous collaboration is used more frequently. We have a Zoom Team Chat solution. People use, more and more, Zoom Team Chat and create more Zoom Docs. If you cannot reach out to your teammates in real time, create a Zoom Doc, share it to the Team Chat. Other people can look at it later on. These async collaboration capabilities are becoming more and more popular, together with the AI. And Zoom is often associated with office work, but you also recently built Zoom Workplace for frontline workers. What motivated that and what does that expansion look like? We build a workplace platform. However, there’s different use cases for some vertical marketsfor educators, the financial industry, healthcare, and frontline workers. The use case is different and the feature set is also different. You can’t build one feature set to serve all these different use cases. The frontline workers’ market is big. A lot of our customers already deploy the Zoom platform. However, they gave us feedback that they need some features for their frontline workers. So, back to our innovation philosophy, when customers share with us the pain point, what can we do? Listen to them and build a new service. That’s how we built a Zoom Workplace for frontline workers, for educators, and for healthcare as well. I think the market is big and we wanted to build more vertical solutions for these different use cases. And as you listen to customer needs, how do you decide which features to build out?
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