5. Shark Week may be more evolutionary than sharks themselves.

Shark Week is 26 years old this season, and year after year, Discovery Channel bravely faces the task of rebranding and promoting the same topic. This year is Shark Week’s most social yet, with GetGlue stickers, live tweets from viewers on-screen during coverage, frequent Facebook updates, Google+ Hangouts with shark experts and an ultra-interactive shark website.

4. Bottom line: it’s a bad week to be a seal.

This year’s promos began in June with Snuffy the Seal. A seemingly live and real TV spot introduced Snuffy being reintroduced to the wild…until a shark promptly swallows him whole, taking the “audience” and Snuffy supporters aback.

A few more spots enlist John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted and an E! True Hollywood Story knockoff to play up the humor of the spots. In fact, the original commercial has been hailed by some as the “one of the best of the year.”

The Shark Week tagline “It’s a bad week to be a seal. For the rest of us it’s pretty awesome” sums up the premise of the campaign and the program. Good advertising is about finding the essence of what’s being promoted – and not making viewers work to figure out how awesome it is. We see what you did there, Discovery Channel.

3. Discovery Channel has a pretty clever marketing team, but they did not plant a dead shark on a New York subway.

Shark Week is all about shark conservation and awareness. When a dead shark appeared on a New York subway line this week, Discovery quickly reacted, firmly renouncing the theories that it was a marketing ploy.

On the other side of the coin, major sponsor Volkswagen will donate $2 for every tweet that mentions the specific hashtag #VWSharkWeek to Surfrider – an organization dedicated to the preservation of oceans and beaches.

2. Even though it got off to a rocky start, Shark Week is a big conversation piece for other brands.

Between the New York shark incident and playing off a fictitious film as a documentary, Shark Week’s gotten caught up in some bad attention this year. But that didn’t stop other brands from jumping aboard the Shark Week ship.

For example:
Doritos makes a play for the bold
The Weather Channel identifies when it’s a bad week to be a shark
Tide is multi-purpose

Brands are battling to stay at the top of the relevancy food chain these days, creating Vines and images about everything from the Super Bowl blackout to the royal baby. Shark Week is no exception.

1. Real-time marketing might be Shark Week’s claim to fame this year, but Magneto’s own Buzz Winkle is Shark Week King.

Of course, he found time to wrangle his very own great white this past weekend, seen above.

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