So the Super Bowl was last night, and I want to talk about the 34 minutes when the lights went out in the Superdome, because it turned into the most interesting thing that happened in my Twitter feed in months and I don't think it was an accident.
Quick recap for anyone who had better things to do on a Sunday night: third quarter, Ravens up big on the 49ers, and the power just... goes. Half the stadium lights die, the broadcast cuts to confused analysts filling time, and for a solid half hour nobody has any idea what's happening or when the game's coming back. Ended up being 34 minutes, which is an absurdly long time for live TV to just sit there with nothing to show you.
And within minutes, or more like it felt instant, Oreo's Twitter account posted a plain little image, black background, single Oreo cookie, and the line "you can still dunk in the dark." That's it. No hashtag stuffing, no exclamation points. And it just took off. I watched it happening in real time on my phone while my cable box showed me a stadium full of confused people standing around in the dark, and honestly the tweet was more entertaining than the broadcast at that point.
Here's the thing that bugs me a little about how this is already getting talked about today (and it's going to be talked about a LOT this week, I can tell): people keep calling it "quick thinking" like some intern spotted the blackout and dashed off a clever line on a whim. That's not what happened. Oreo had an actual team (writers, a strategist, a designer, someone with sign-off authority) sitting in what's basically a war room for the entire game, watching for exactly this kind of opening. That's not spontaneity, thats logistics. Which honestly I find more impressive, not less. Writing one good tweet on the fly is luck. Building the infrastructure to write and approve and publish a good tweet in under ten minutes, with a brand-safe image attached, during a live global broadcast, is a completely different skill and it's the one that actually matters if you do any of this for a living.
I do a little bit of community/social stuff for the site I freelance for on the side (not naming it, but if you've read this blog a while you probably know which one), and even at our tiny scale, getting anything approved fast is the hard part. Somebody always wants to "run it by legal" or "sleep on it," and by the time you sleep on a joke it's dead. Oreo apparently solved that problem ahead of time instead of trying to solve it in the moment, and that's the actual lesson here, not "be witty on the internet," which is advice about as useful as "be taller."
The other thing I noticed, and this is a smaller and pettier complaint: my own cable provider's app couldn't even manage to push an alert telling me the game was delayed, let alone anything clever. I had to find out the power was out from Twitter before the network even said anything on air. That's a pretty telling gap — a cookie company had better real-time information flow last night than a company whose entire job is broadcasting live events. Not exactly a new observation that legacy media is slow, but it's rarely this visible, side by side, in the same 34 minutes.
I also want to say, because nobody else seems to be bringing it up: the blackout tweet is going to get written about to death this week as some kind of marketing miracle, and a year from now every agency pitch deck in the country is going to have a slide with that Oreo image on it captioned "be like this." And most of the imitators are going to fail, because they'll copy the tweet and skip the part where you build a team that can actually ship something in nine minutes flat. That part's boring. Nobody puts "we had an approval workflow" on a slide.
Anyway. Ravens won it 34-31 in the end, which almost got lost in all this. Good game, weird night, and I'm still a little annoyed my DVR cut off the post-game because it was scheduled assuming a normal-length broadcast.