US Brands Celebrate Controversy-Free News Event

US Brands Celebrate Controversy-Free News Event

It’s been a tough year in the news. White supremacists are committing acts of domestic terrorism. North Korea is threatening nuclear war. How are brands supposed to have fun on social media when all this bad stuff is happening?! The great American solar eclipse is how.

Image: Getty / WikiCommons

Today, brands unleashed a torrent of tweets about the solar eclipse. Most of them feature circular products that the specific companies want people to think about when they put on their 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 isn’t 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 isn’t the point. We had a completely non-controversial event that captivated the internet like nothing else 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 capitalise 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 crap gets good when brands use the eclipse as an excuse to throw shade at their competitors. The last one is the best.


White Castle

Outback Steakhouse

Krispy Kreme





Waffle House


Domino’s (featuring DiGiorno)

Moon Pie