If you have something to say that your fanatic customers will want to hear, but it’s going to piss some other people off, you need to say it. Say it loud and say it proud.
Discovery Channel has developed quite a franchise with its annual Shark Week television series. Shark Week was originally developed to raise awareness and respect for sharks. It’s become must see TV for about 30 million people each year who marvel at these predatory ocean hit-men through spectacular underwater ocean footage.
To promote the new 2013 season of Shark Week, Discovery Channel created an ad featuring a local news report of an event to release Snuffy the Seal back into the ocean amidst a crowd of cheering citizens. According to the report, Snuffy was rescued when he washed ashore “injured and dehydrated.” Unfortunately for Snuffy, Shark Week is “a Bad Week to Be a Seal.”
The responses to the ad on the internet have been polarizing, but can be summed up by Shark Week’s Facebook fan Robert Richardson, who wrote:
I LOVED that ad. Awesome. However, my seven-year-old cried for 15 minutes afterward. The ad’s definitely not for kids and he won’t be watching the ad again. For this adult, however….I can’t stop laughing. Am I wrong? In any case, Will be watching in August.
I’m not a Shark Week fan, but the ad obviously caught my attention, made me acknowledge the audacity of the ad, and led me help spread the news about Shark Week to my friends and family on my own Facebook:
The lesson to learn from this ad is to find creative ways to state the obvious. Anybody who watches Shark Week knows that sharks are predatory animals. The very nature of their ferocity makes the show breathtaking to watch, knowing that we’re seeing dangerous animals in such close view. But when you reinforce that knowledge by putting it in an unexpected and very specific context, you almost can’t fail but attract attention.
With countless internet articles about the ad (including this one), over 1.5 million youtube views as of this posting, hundreds of comments about the ad on Shark Week’s Facebook page, and even a Snuffy the Seal twitter account (2,960 followers) and a counter campaign to Save Snuffy (Website / Facebook) all choreographed by Discovery Channel, the message is clearly spreading.
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it, then let me know whether you would have the audacity to run the same ad if you were leading the Shark Week business. Leave a comment below.