Image: Getty / WikiCommons
It’s been a tough year in the news. White supremacists are committing acts of domestic terrorism. North Korea is threatening nuclear war. Trump is president. How are brands supposed to have fun on social media when all this bad stuff is happening?! The great American solar eclipse is how.
On Monday, brands unleashed a torrent of tweets about the solar eclipse. Most of them features circular products that the specific companies want you to think about when you put on those glossy eclipse glasses and stare up at the sky, as the circular moon slowly obscures the circular sun. Most of the tweets involve moving the circular product in front of the sun, as if it were the moon in a solar eclipse. There’s not a whole lot else a brand can do to celebrate an eclipse, aside from give away some free circular products, which some brands did.
But that’s not the point. We had a completely non-controversial event that captivated the internet like the eclipse since, I dunno, 2015. (Remember the llama chase? Remember the dress?) Now, a little over halfway through this garbage year, everyone can look up at the sky and enjoy a completely non-political act of natural wonder. This is exactly the kind of fun that brands want to capitalize on, and they might not get the chance to do it again until 2020.
Without further ado, here are the tweets. They’re mostly predictable, but shit gets good when brands use the eclipse as an excuse to throw shade at their competitors. The last one is the best.