Portland got a bite out of the sun and a lot of cloud, so I did what most of the country did yesterday afternoon and watched other people have the experience. The NASA stream from Texas, then Indiana, then Vermont. My sister in Dallas sent a voice memo of the crowd sound at totality. That sound is the whole story.
Somewhere between thirty and fifty million people stood outside in the path yesterday, and tens of millions more watched from wherever they were. Nobody had to be persuaded to care. Nobody was targeted. There was no funnel.
Which is why the brand tie-ins landed so badly.
My feed yesterday was a parade of eclipse-themed posts from companies with nothing to say about the sun. Cookies arranged into a corona. A donut with a bite out of it. Sunglasses puns from a bank. Every one of them was technically competent and every one of them made the brand look like a person at a funeral loudly explaining their diet.
Shared attention is the rarest thing in this economy and it cannot be purchased, which means the only question worth asking is whether you have standing to be in the moment at all.
Standing is not a soft concept. It is testable. Warby Parker gave away eclipse glasses in every store, free, no purchase, weeks in advance. That is standing, because they make eyewear and the moment created an actual safety problem they were positioned to solve. Solar Eclipse Timer and the astronomy suppliers had standing. The hotels along the path in Ohio and Arkansas had standing because they were physically hosting the thing.
A regional insurance company posting a moon pun does not have standing. It has a social calendar and a gap to fill.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I know how the gap gets filled. Somebody builds a cultural moments calendar in January. The eclipse goes on it because it is a known date. By March nobody remembers why it went on the calendar, only that it is on there, and the deliverable is now due. The strategy was replaced by the schedule six weeks earlier and nobody noticed.
The better move on a day like yesterday is silence, or something useful and unbranded. The audience is not confused about who is participating and who is advertising. They can hear the difference the way you can hear the difference between a crowd cheering and a crowd being told to cheer.
The strategy was replaced by the schedule six weeks earlier and nobody noticed.
The last time Oregon got the real thing was 2017 and I drove to a field outside Madras with a thermos and no plan. I remember the temperature dropping and the birds going quiet. I do not remember a single brand that was there. That is the point.