So I stayed up way too late last night watching the Super Bowl, and this morning my Twitter feed is not about the actual football game. Everyone else on the internet has spent the last twelve hours writing about the ending (the interception at the goal line instead of just handing the ball to Marshawn Lynch, which every sports blog on earth is dissecting play by play), so I'm not going to rehash that here. Patriots won 28-24. Fine. What I actually want to talk about is the shark.
If you didn't watch, Katy Perry's halftime show had a bunch of backup dancers in shark costumes doing choreographed moves next to her, and one of them (stage left, hence "Left Shark") was clearly either lost, improvising, or just didn't care anymore. He was doing his own thing the entire time, a beat behind everyone else, fully committed to whatever was happening in his own head. It was maybe four seconds of screen time. By the time I checked my phone after the show ended it was already a fully formed meme, Photoshops and all. Four seconds. That's genuinely astonishing to me: not the shark itself, which is just a guy having a bad night at work in front of 114 million people, but how fast the internet turned it into a whole thing. Nielsen said this was the most-watched broadcast in US television history, something like 114.4 million people on average across the game, and a meaningful chunk of them were apparently watching Left Shark instead of the actual field.
The other thing that stuck with me more than the game itself was the very last ad, the one Esurance ran right after the final whistle. John Krasinski does the pitch, tells everyone the company saved money by not buying a normal in-game ad slot and is instead giving away $1.5 million to people who tweet #EsuranceSave30, with a new winner picked something like every 30 minutes over the following weeks. I watched the hashtag number climb in real time and it was kind of wild — at one point the tweet volume around that hashtag reportedly beat the volume of tweets about the game itself, which had just ended in one of the more dramatic finishes the Super Bowl has had in years. A company gave away a football-shaped pile of money to get people to type six characters into a text box, and it worked better than the actual sport.
I have mixed feelings about this, honestly. Part of me thinks it's clever as hell, cheaper than a $4.5 million :30 slot, and it turned every entrant into a tiny unpaid billboard for half an hour. Part of me thinks it's a little depressing that the easiest way to win the internet's attention on the biggest advertising night of the year isn't a good ad, it's just cash with a hashtag stapled to it. Doritos has been doing crowdsourced ad contests for years and at least those produce something. This was just "tweet a string of characters, maybe get money." I don't think that's a real trend so much as a one-off stunt that happened to land on a night when 114 million people were already staring at their phones anyway, half-watching a football game.
What I keep coming back to is how disposable all of it is already, less than a day later. Left Shark is going to be a t-shirt by Wednesday and completely forgotten by March. The Esurance hashtag will quietly die once the money's given out. None of this is a complaint exactly, more just noticing the shape of it: the actual football, the thing over three hours long that people spent money on tickets and beer and snacks to watch, produced one iconic moment (that interception, which I promised I wasn't going to talk about and then talked about anyway), and the four seconds of a guy in a rubber shark suit not knowing his cues produced roughly the same amount of cultural footprint. Cheaper to make, too. Somebody in an ad agency somewhere is taking notes on that math right now, and I don't love where it leads.
Also, small aside: my cable box froze for about ninety seconds right as the shark thing was happening live, because of course it did, and I ended up watching the whole bit later on someone's shaky phone video posted to Vine. Vine, in 2015, was still how a lot of this stuff actually spread before Twitter itself caught up. Worth remembering that part too.