Super Bowl -

So here’s what happened.

I was at the airport waiting for my flight home from CES — exhausted, sick, and not a little partied out from a week in Vegas. Delirious, in other words. And as I waited to board, I watched and re-watched the latest video from our outstanding video team, in which 257 gadgets fly by in just three minutes, with Dieter narrating from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

In retrospect, I probably should have waited until the majority of my brain function had returned before asking for 4.5 million dollars, but, um, yolo.

Thankfully, our head of marketing Jon Hunt identified the fragments of a good idea in the mental wreckage I had sent along, and he suggested that we make a real ad but only buy it in a small market — that way we could tell everyone we’d run a Super Bowl ad, but spend far less money. When he told me that a 30-second ad during the first quarter of the game only cost $700 in Helena, Montana, I knew we were in. (Other options: Tulsa, Oklahoma, for $12,500; Fairbanks, Alaska, for $3,000; and Missoula, Montana, for $2,200.)

The next step was the ad — we decided against running the 257 Gadgets video because it was too heady and hard to cut down to a believable 30 seconds, so we needed something else, and it needed to be believable and kind of crazy. We had an unused pilot for a show called Futureworld lying on the shelf, so we decided to update it with a bunch of new shots, and I rewrote the voiceover to be as generically soaring as possible. We hired a professional voiceover artist to come in and lend the whole thing an air of corporate respectability. It took him all of 15 minutes to nail it. “That was the easiest money I’ve ever seen anyone make,” our director John told me. The goal was to make something that worked in virtually any context; I kept joking we could show basically any logo at the end of the ad and it would work. Coca-Cola. MasterCard. GE. Chevy. The Verge. Cheez-Its.

Then — and this is where the wheels really started to wobble and I should have known they would come right off the bus — I asked John to move the shot of Ross crying in the Gear VR to sync up with the voiceover saying “and even how we die.” We were cracking up laughing when we did it — but I didn’t realize that we’d sent the whole thing so far over the top that it actually started to look like we were serious.

But eventually we came clean, and most people weren’t mad — it was a good-natured prank, and we had been careful to never actually lie. It was just some fun for an afternoon on Twitter and in the media blogs.

I had to know how this was all going to go down. So enterprising young reporter Sydne Cook hit Helena’s local Buffalo Wild Wings to record it when it aired, and then see what people thought. It was weird to watch the game in New York and know that The Verge was being advertised in Montana; the internet makes it seem like all media is a global phenomenon, but television is still intensely local. At 6:50PM, the 25,000 people of Helena, Montana, saw something that none of the 100 million other people watching the Super Bowl saw. That’s pretty wild.