How the Blackout Light Up the Super Bowl

As the Super Dome in New Orleans went dark Sunday night, I could not help but hope that Ray Lewis was going to ascend into heaven. Unfortunatley this was not the case, and the cause of the outage is still a mystery. Despite what most would assume, the outage actually caused a spike in viewers of the seemingly blown out game. I will admit, I too changed the channel after watching Joe Flacco effortlessly lead his team down the field for the 4th time. Luckily, my fellow hall-mate barged through my door exclaiming, "there's a Black Out!". As i waited patiently for 34 minutes, I couldn't help but contemplate the economic effects of the blackout on advertisers that spent on average $3.8 Million per commercial. However, as the lights returned, the 49er's decided to turn away from the light at the end of the tunnel, the ratings with them. Following the blackout, CBS reported that 49.6% of tv's in major markets were tuned into the Superbowl. A side effect of this is the popularity of the Adds that played in the second half, for example, the Toyota add featuring stars of the Big Bang Theory, or Oreo's commercial debating what part of the Oreo is better? What does this mean? Well for Oreo it means 10,000 followers on Instagram and twitter, which in turns mean a SH!t ton of cookies will be flying off of shelves in the next few days! Which in essence is the only desire of advertisers. All in all, thank you blackout for talking me into buying Oreo's which I am currently enjoying as I type.