Shark In LAKE ONTARIO!!!  Viral marketing video causes a stir.

     A video of the Lake Ontario "shark" was posted July 10, 2014 on YouTube and had gone viral with more than 500,000 views three days later. The one thing that wasn't expected was how quickly the video went viral in Canada. The hoax video that caused real-world consternation the second week of July, demonstrates the attention-grabbing risks marketers are taking in an increasingly media-fractured universe. Six days after the Youtube video surfaced that frightened some lake users and sparked safety concerns on the lake, ultimately reached the Ontario legislature — that Discovery Canada admitted the finned creature was a life-like model.
      Discovery Canada President said the idea was to create some buzz for an upcoming TV show on Discovery called Shark Week. There was no intent to cause terror or from having people not enter the lake. Once the team realized the panic had set in, Discovery wanted to to come clean on the marketing effort they had setup with Nissan and calm everyone's fear. The shark in the video was an actual model and not a real live shark.
     What’s clear, experts say, is that Discovery’s shark campaign did reach part of advertising’s holy grail: awareness spread via social-media sharing and water-cooler chat — in this case about the possibility or improbability of sharks in the lake. So in this case the marketing grouped engineered a viral video, that ended up provoking anger and upset people, which was not the intent of the marketing group.Which led them to come clean about the video, before any more harm was done or the negativity came back and hurt the Discovery brand. Marketers and advertisers will keep pushing the limits to try to make people sit up and take notice, but in this case it took a wrong turn and Discovery had to step in.

Press Release by Bell Media out of Canada confirms video is a Hoax. Promo for Nissan and Discovery Channel Shark Week coming in August. (Press Release)

~Brandon S.