ALBERTO GONZALEZ
Staff Scallywag
First off, let’s get one thing out of the way: this is not a Tide ad. As unfortunate as that is, a statement such as this is in stark contrast to the Super Bowl commercials which really upped their game.
From Danny DeVito running around asking people if they wanted to eat him, to Eli Manning and OBJ dancing like no one was watching, the ads crammed between mere seconds of actual football were more than just palatable. When there is such a wide selection of good ads, the conversation always naturally goes to which one was the best.
Well, there is a dark horse of the ads that immediately started garnishing a cult following. Some described it as an advertisement on pace to be the great work of art from this generation (sorry Starman), others called it a
multimillion dollar “equipment failure” that caused many fans to worry that their TV’s were broken. Of course, we are talking about the 30 second black screen that happened in the middle of the second quarter of the most viewed football game on the planet.
There was an onslaught of conspiracy theories, but in the midst of the speculation something very interesting started to happen. Almost as if a nihilist switch had miraculously turned on in everyone’s collective psyche, the dead air acted as a catalyst to the idea that the black screen was really just a physical manifestation of the souls watching the game.
In the aftermath of the capitalist propaganda machine, there was a 4,000 percent spike in Tide Pods in the days after the big game. A recently released consumer survey actually suggests the steep rise in sales has nothing at all to do with the Tide ads. This survey is instead giving all the credit to the black screen of death, which reminded everyone of their fleeting mortality and has caused them to always want a plan B option around.
