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About a year ago, I spent the evening at a club I’d never set foot in to see a band I’d never seen. Think of it as a double on experience points.

I get there, and some time later the middle act - the group I had intended to see - begins as planned, probably. I didn’t see it. That’s because by that point I was off introducing my Chatty Cathy self to their opener, a Chicago-based three-piece whose brief set as the first of the night’s two bookends had me all giddy and stuff.

I don’t know that I’ll forget - I haven’t yet, anyway - a thing their front man said to me well into our talk. He’d asked, as some bands do, what brought me out that night, and I listed off a few things: 1) that my day job (at the time) was helping to launch an iTunes-like music store for independent artists, 2) that in addition to the website, I blogged about music on my own and I wanted to write about a show in my neighborhood and 3) that I’d heard from a friend that the act I was now missing was “good,” and that “it would be worth my time to go out and see them.”

So many things brought me out, but mainly the third thing.

To that point, the front man drew a mystified expression on his face, as if he’d been told in 2005 how Lost would end five years later. Largely confused why someone would pay for a show with little to no knowledge of its in-house bands, he said: “Man, nobody does that, to show up to a show like that. Nobody does that.”

Throw everything I’ve written so far into a sack, put the sack down and then remember where you left it.

Skip ahead to this week to an article appearing in The New York Times. Titled The Pregame Show (of Commercials) Begins,” the story explores how the Internet and social media altered the way we devour and talk about our media. Its emerging trends seem to contradict conventional thought on how to present Super Bowl commercials effectively.

Companies, apparently, no longer wait for the Big Day to unveil their $3.5 million buys; many of them, now, post teasers of their advertisements online - if not the whole thing - with aims to stimulate conversation about their ads, and consequently, their products.

As I perused the thing, I couldn’t help but feel wayyyy out of the loop. I barely watched much Super Bowl the past several years, I’m not one to brag about hilarious YouTube videos and post them to my
Facebook - that is, of course, if I had Facebook - and the rest of it. Yet I continued to read, as I tend to do anyway with the Times, and came away quite fascinated about how tens of millions of people will have actively seen many of this year’s Super Bowl ads before, you know, the Super Bowl.

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