It’s Shark Week again. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You’ve seen it mentioned every 30 seconds in your Twitter feed. At least one-quarter of your Facebook friends have been posting incessantly about how psyched they are about it. Every news site on the Internet (includingthisone, natch) has posted at least a dozen stories alerting you to everything from its marketing potential to the dubiousness of its “documentaries” (fun fact: the 35-foot-long “submarine shark” is not real). There’s a man with a megaphone on your street corner yelling “Shark Week!” at the top of his lungs, 24 hours a day.
By now, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with a Southern Comfort spot. Well, it seems that SoCo has too fallen prey to shark fever (which is not an actual illness, but is the title of a Baywatch episode), as evidenced by latest installment in the brand’s super-weird-but-kind-of-great“Whatever’s Comfortable” campaign from Wieden + Kennedy in New York.
The new spot, titled “Shark” (yep), features the campaign’s first female lead. Dressed in an aggressively acid-washed denim jacket, she sits alone at a jazz club, tapping her finger along to the beat. Upon further inspection, we discover that her talon-like nails are decorated with expertly airbrushed sharks’ jaws, which she uses to slowly stir her drink before piercing the maraschino cherry at the bottom of the glass like a bloody piece of prey and depositing it into her own gaping maw.
In case you're still not feeling Shark Week-ed out, Southern Comfort is also adding a shark-based social digital layer to the campaign. The brand has apparently “adopted” a shark, which it has dubbed The Sharktender. Starting tomorrow, SouthernComfort.com will track his whereabouts while also offering “location-based drink recommendations.” Yeah, it's sort of ridiculous, but if you’re going to sit through four hours of “Zombie Sharks” and “Air Jaws: Fin of Fury” on Discovery, you’re probably better off plastered.
CREDITS
Client: Brown-Forman
Spot: “Shark”
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, New York
Executive Creative Director: Susan Hoffman
Creative Directors: Jimm Lasser, Caleb Jensen
Creatives: Laddie Peterson, Jeff Dryer
Producer: Orlee Tatarka
Head of Content Production: Nick Setounski
Account Team: Toby Hussey, Katie Hoak
Production Company: Biscuit Filmworks
Director: Steve Rogers
Executive Producer: Holly Vega
Managing Director: Shawn Lacy
Line Producer: Kathy Rhodes
Director of Photography: Benoit Delhomme
Editing Company: Mackenzie Cutler
Editor: Gavin Cutler
Assistant Editor: Ryan Steele
Post Executive Producer: Sasha Hirschfeld
Visual Effects Company: The Mill
Visual Effects Senior Producers: Orlaith Finucane, Aleen Kim
Flame Artist, Creative Director: Jade Kim (Lead), Margolit Steiner
Computer Graphics Artist: Laurent Giaume
Song: "Little Red Riding Hood"
Artists: Bushwalla (Lead Vocals), Sallie Ford (Background Vocals), Graeme Gibson, Sallie Ford (Instrumentals)
Music Company: Walker
Mix Company: Sonic Union
Mixer: Steve Rosen