So it's Tuesday and I still have "Left Shark" GIFs in three separate group chats. That's basically the whole blog post right there, but I'll keep typing anyway because I've got a coffee and nowhere to be.
Sunday night I was at Dave's for the Super Bowl, mostly for the food (his wife makes a chili that I still think about at random moments, which is a strange thing to admit about chili) and only kind of for the game. Patriots beat the Seahawks 28-24, and if you somehow missed it, the whole thing came down to Russell Wilson throwing a pass from the one-yard line with under a minute left and a rookie corner named Malcolm Butler picking it off right at the goal line. Dave, who is a lifelong Seahawks guy, did not say a single word for about four minutes. I've known him twelve years and I don't think I've ever seen him go quiet like that.
But that's not really what I want to write about, because a hundred sports blogs already did the play-by-play better than I could. What I keep thinking about is how fast the internet processed the halftime show compared to the game itself.
Katy Perry did her set with two guys in shark costumes dancing behind her, and one of them (left side, from the audience's perspective, so naturally "Left Shark") just did not know the choreography. At all. He was doing his own thing the entire number, flailing around a half-beat behind everyone else like a kid at a wedding who wandered onto the dance floor by accident. It was maybe four minutes of television. By the time the third quarter kicked off, my phone was already full of it. Cropped GIFs, still frames, someone had made a fake motivational poster before halftime was even fully over. I don't know how you make and caption a poster that fast, but somebody did.
That's the thing that's stuck with me more than the game. It used to be that a moment like that would take a day to really spread, maybe show up on a late night show clip Monday and then circulate from there. Now it's simultaneous. The event and the reaction to the event are happening on the same screen, at the same time, for anyone with a second device in their hand, which by 2015 is basically everyone watching. My uncle, who does not own a smartphone by choice (he says it's a "leash," which, fine, he's not wrong exactly) was the only person in that living room not looking at Left Shark memes during the third quarter.
There was also the Nationwide ad, the one with the kid narrating a list of things he'll never get to do because he died in an accident, meant to be about child safety. I watched Dave's whole living room go dead silent and uncomfortable in a completely different way than the game ending did. People were furious about it online within minutes, not because the message was wrong, but because you don't put that between chip commercials. Somebody in the room actually said "did they really just do that" out loud. Nationwide apparently didn't expect the backlash either, which seems like a strange thing to not expect when you're airing during the single most-watched broadcast of the year and spending, what, four and a half million dollars for thirty seconds.
I'm not going to pretend I have some grand theory about advertising or live television or what any of this means for how brands should behave. I just think it's interesting, in kind of an uneasy way, that a badly choreographed shark costume got more genuine, immediate delight out of people than a multi-million dollar ad campaign built by an actual agency. Nobody planned Left Shark. That's probably the whole point.
I did try to explain the shark thing to my mom on the phone Monday and gave up about ninety seconds in. Some things you just had to be online for at 8:47pm on a Sunday.
Anyway, the chili recipe is apparently a "family thing" and Dave's wife won't give it up, which I've decided to take as a personal challenge for next year.