Volkswagen Sponsors Discovery Channel’s 28th ‘Shark Week’

If the prospect of E. coli bacteria and fish urine wasn’t enough to make you never want to swim in an open body of water ever again, every year, there’s Discovery’s “Shark Week.” It’s an entire week out of the calendar year devoted entirely to exposing the prehistoric fish-monster-things ever-present in the world’s saltwater bodies, literally just waiting for the moment that they can tear themselves off a sizeable portion of your flesh.

That starts this Sunday, July 5^th.

And, for the fourth year in a row, the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week is being sponsored by Volkswagen AG, who’ve drafted a rather interactive campaign for this year’s carniverous festivities. The campaign is called “Sharks Rescored,” and at its core is music: how it can be used to change peoples’ perceptions of sharks, not only as human-killing abominable water-dwellers, but as a vital part of the ocean’s ecosystem, as well.

All next week, at the SharksRescored.com website, you will be invited to partake in an interactive Shark Week experience which includes the trailer for a mini-documentary, a game called simply “SportWagen or Shark?” to which every answer is (somehow) either “SportWagen,” or “Shark,” and niftiest of all, a feature using eye-tracking technology and an interactive music score laid over shark footage, reportedly aimed at showing how music can change one’s perception of sharks. After participating in all three features of the Shark Week “Sharks Rescored” interactive website, you can view the full 3-minute mini-documentary, which covers the making of this year’s Shark Week music score.

You may be thinking to yourself: “But [author], the ties cognitively-linking sharks to the all-new 2015 VW Golf SportWagen are tenuous at best.” You would be absolutely, 100 percent right. It would be a stretch (or hopefully, entirely inaccurate) to say that the new Golf SportWagen is anywhere near as menacing and kill-happy as the gilled grizzly bears of the sea. But we certainly look forward to seeing how Volkswagen US answers the query during its sponsorship of the 28^th Shark Week.