Shark Week Turns into a Feeding Frenzy for Consumer Eyeballs—and Cash

The Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" kicks off on Sunday, August 10, bringing the frenzy of interest in the fascinating creatures of the deep to all new heights. The annual event is a ratings bonanza, and a hot topic on social media, complete with its own prerequisite hashtag #sharkweek.

While there's nothing stopping "Shark Week" from being fun, entertaining, and informative all at once, some experts in the field—of scientific research, not entertainment or marketing—feel like the circus surrounding sharks is overkill, perhaps even exploitive. "I'm kind of disappointed, and I think most researchers are, too," George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told USA Today. "It obviously is a big draw, but I'm afraid that the programs have gone more to entertainment and less to documentary over the years. It's kind of a shame, because they have the opportunity to teach good stuff in what's going on with science."

The Discovery Channel is hardly the only party that's guilty of playing to the lowest common denominator by focusing on "blood and gore or animals performing tricks," as Burgess put it. And it's hardly the only player out there trying to hook consumers' attention (and dollars) by way of the shark.

Sharks—or more precisely, the fear of sharks—have a long history of helping to sell stuff. Movie tickets, for instance. Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" not only kicked off the summer blockbuster as a phenomenon, but is also widely considered the biggest and best summer blockbuster film of all time. A series of sequels and other shark movies followed, as did the ever-expanding, factually questionable "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel. In the so-called "Summer of the Shark," in 2001 (mere weeks before 9/11, it's often noted, when very different fears took over the American consciousness), unwarranted hype over shark attacks was used to sell magazines and keep viewers glued to 24/7 news channels, awaiting word of the next deadly aquatic encounter.

We're still fascinated by sharks, and sharks are still being used to lure us into shops and TV shows and movies that we should probably know better than to watch. Lately, in an age dominated by memes and ironic-air-quotes "entertainment," the cold-blooded mankiller of the deep has been replaced by an equally fictitious creature—the shark as adorable mascot.

This summer, "Shark Week" has been joined by the straight-to-cable arrival of the gag "movie" "Sharknado 2." But given how much over-the-top goofball hype goes into "Shark Week" itself—Rob Lowe waterskiing atop two great whites anyone?—the Discovery Channel event seems to be its own best parody.

The merchandising of sharks and "Shark Week" has been, in a word, shark-tastic (the title of a book sold on the Discovery Channel, naturally). Among the roughly 150 items listed on the site as appropriate purchases for "Shark Week" celebration are shark kites, a Shark Week smartphone case, Shark Week bottle openers and coozies, "clever" shark T-shirts that say "Bite Me" and "I'm Hammered," and Shark Week cupcakes that show Rob Lowe atop his pal sharks again.

Elsewhere in the ocean of summertime shark products, Dunkin' Donuts is selling a Shark Bite Donut (the frosting resembles a life preserver), and Cold Stone Creamery has shark-themed cupcakes and ice cream sundaes, complete with colorful gummy sharks. Limited-edition "Shark Week"-inspired soap is available at one New York City boutique, while a "Shark Week" search at etsy turns up more than 1,300 hand puppets, pencil holders, custom-designed panties, pieces of jewelry, and other crafts. A whole other list of goods has been devoted to the frenzy around "Sharknado," including a new perfume called "Shark by Tara," created by one of the movie's stars, Tara Reid.

The normally sober tacticians at Consumer Reports even got in on the action, using the Sharknado sequel as an excuse to run a review of chainsaws—the perfect weapon in the battle against sharks falling out of the sky.

Then there's shark tourism. It might seem odd that any beach community would actively want to associate itself with sharks. Yet the effort to brand Chatham, Mass., the town on the elbow of Cape Cod—near plenty of seals and therefore sharks too—as something along the lines of the Shark Capital of America has been several years in the making. Starting in 2009, news spread that biologists were tagging great white sharks off the coast. Sure, it freaked some swimmers and boaters out, but it also drew the masses to the coast, bearing binoculars with the hope of spotting one of the beasts.

“The great white shark is sexy,” Lisa Franz, Chatham's chamber of commerce chief, explained to the Boston Globe last summer. “Chatham as a town, I think, has embraced the whole shark concept,” she said. “As long as nobody gets hurt.”

Fast-forward a year, and the shark schlock business is booming. "Truthfully, we've probably grown about 500 percent in terms of the sale of our shark apparel,’’ one Chatham tourist shop owner offering "T-shirts, hoodies, hats, belts, dog collars and other accessories" featuring great whites for $10 to $45 told the Associated Press in June.

People seem to love the shark meme so much that local restaurants and shopkeepers understandably have a new fear: They're scared about what would happen to business if the sharks suddenly went away.