Last Sunday the entire country watched the Super Bowl halftime show. Did we watch the game? Nope.
We were wandering an empty Costco like a pair of feral raccoons who'd found a warehouse full of bulk snacks.
Did we watch the halftime show? We watched the highlights. (We're metal fans at heart. Don't @ us.)
But Bad Bunny did something genuinely smart up there, and it's been rattling around in my brain all week because it has almost nothing to do with music and everything to do with how organizations think about their audience.
He could have made it ALL about him.
The Super Bowl halftime show is one of the biggest stages on the planet. Millions of eyes. One spotlight. Most artists in that position go full "this is MY moment, everyone else can sit down."
Bad Bunny turned it into a party instead. Surprise appearances from other Latin artists and actors. Even Lady Gaga showed up — as an ally, not a co-headliner. What could've been a solo flex became a shared moment.
Here's the part that actually matters for your organization.
He wasn't worried his collaborators would outshine him. He wasn't scared his audience would wander off and fall in love with someone else instead.
He understood something most organizations get completely backwards: sharing the spotlight doesn't shrink your slice of it. It makes the whole pie bigger.
His audience doesn't just love his music now. They love his generosity, his taste, his willingness to hand the mic to other people. That's not losing attention to collaborators. That's deepening trust with the people already paying attention to you.
Most organizations treat their audience like a finite resource. It's not.
I see this constantly in strategy work: leadership treats their audience's attention like a fixed pie, where recommending someone else means losing a slice. Pointing your people toward another organization feels like handing over territory.
But that's not how trust actually works.
When someone you already trust says, "Hey, this group is doing great work — you should know about them," do you trust that person less? Or do you trust them more, because they just made your life easier?
Your audience already trusts your judgment. That trust doesn't shrink when you share it. It compounds.
So who should you actually be pointing your audience toward?
Look at who else your audience already pays attention to. Not your competitors — the organizations serving the same people from a different angle.
A few ways that shows up in real life:
You're not sending your audience away. You're becoming the person who knows everyone worth knowing in your corner of the world. That's not a threat to the relationship. That IS the relationship.
Not ready for a full partnership? Start small. Like, embarrassingly small.
You don't need a co-branded campaign or a joint webinar series to test this. Try:
That's it. That's the whole move.
The real question:
Are you hoarding your audience, or are you treating them like people who deserve to know about good work happening around them?
Bad Bunny didn't build a fiercely loyal audience by playing it safe and hogging the spotlight. He built it by being generous with it — on the biggest stage in the world, with nothing to gain by sharing and everything to lose if it flopped.
That's not gatekeeping. That's the opposite of gatekeeping. And it's a much better long game.