Shark Week, the annual television event where people nationwide deliberately ignore fine summer weather in favor of watching shark programming 24/7, is almost upon us.

The very first thing Discovery and mOcean put out for this, the 26th year of Shark Week, was the promo above: a newscast touting the homecoming of a seal, the local hero. It all goes well until sharks get involved. Then again, it’s not called Cute Seals Week.

This week the TODAY show called it the “best commercial ever” and it’s had more than 1.5 million views on YouTube - and it’s only aired on TV twice. Although Shark Week doesn’t officially start until August 4, both Lara Richardson, SVP of marketing at Discovery, and Peter McKeon, director/CD at mOcean, agreed that this was above taking the chance to pull people in, intrigue them, and go for shock and awe.

“Everyone knows what this is, so we have to just get the awareness out there and continue to find ways to cut through the clutter,” said Richardson.

And mOcean decided that the best way to cut through the clutter was to firmly grab hold of people’s attention. Last year, the key art and promos revolved around a shark jumping out from the TV. This year, they had to go past that somehow. According to McKeon, it began by asking themselves, “How do we light people up? What can we do to shock people?”

The result is that it’s not all about the shark - it becomes about the seal, Snuffy the Seal, who is now popular in his own right. He even has his own Twitter account.

Check out Discovery’s full promo here.

CREDITS:

mOCEAN:

Director: Peter McKeon

Creative Director: Peter McKeon

Executive Producer: Teresa Antista

VP, Accounts: Candace Reid

Producer: Don Anderson

Post Producer: Zach Lyall

DP: Kevin Sarnoff

Editor: Philippe Bergerioux

Director Of Animation/Technical Director: Quico Encinas

Animator: Stanley Ng

Designer: Julia Kipermann

Puppeteers: Legacy Effects

DISCOVERY:

SVP Marketing: Lara Richardson

Supervising Producer: Jason Turner

Director, Broadcast Production Management: Marley Bunce

Tags:


  Save as PDF