Dunkin's Shark Week Donut Is Not for Use as a Flotation Device

Dunkin’ Donuts has partnered with Discovery Channel’s beloved Shark Week to bring you the offering above, the Shark Bite donut, a yeast confection iced with a red-and-white pattern resembling a life preserver.

The partnership extends to the Dunkin’ logo on the Shark Week homepage—it’s mostly the same, except it shows a missing bite and the slogan reads, “Shark Week runs on Dunkin'” rather than “America runs on Dunkin'”.

The donut is going out to select stores across the country, says Harold Morgenstern, svp of national ad sales for Discovery. “Very rarely does Dunkin’ Donuts change its logo,” he said. The deal is part of a larger Discovery partnership for the restaurant: “They’ll be in all of our higher-rated premiere shows across the network,” said Morgenstern. “For Shark Week, [Dunkin’ is] new. They’ve been on and off the network for quite some time.” Morgenstern says the partnership will also include a billboard in Times Square and ways for fans to interact.

“We’re going to have ‘Take a Bite, Take a Pic,’ encouraging fans to take a bite and take a picture of it [for social media]. During Shark After Dark, we’ll show some of those and have some prizing involved,” he said.

Accordingly, we thought of some suggestions for future donut/show integrations.

Nude Donut (Naked & Afraid) — It’s free, but you don’t get a napkin.

Crab Surprise (Deadliest Catch) — A box with 11 mousetraps and one donut inside.

Lucky Donut (Gold Rush) — Available to groups of 10 or more. One customer gets a delicious donut of his or her choice, and everyone else gets cold french fries.

Hide-a-Donut (Moonshiners) — Actually a flask.

Experimental Donut (Mythbusters) — Explodes.

We expect to hear back from Discovery about these suggestions any moment now. Shark Week comes back Aug. 10; you can get your life preserver donut at Dunkin’ from Aug. 4.



Volkswagen Swims with Sharks for a Week


Discovery’s annual Shark Week extravaganza not only confirms that viewers go crazy for underwater creatures that can rip them into a thousand pieces, but that brands will use just about any tangential connection to a popular theme to try and wring out that extra dollar. Take the fat, colorful Tide billboard above the Lincoln Tunnel that I came across yesterday: “We get the blood out, too.” That’s one way to do it.

Volkswagen and Deutsch are going all in as well, bringing cars and sharks a lot closer than they’ve ever been before, a true sharknado of brand association if there ever was one. The VW campaign is loaded on social media, mainly focusing on sharable videos through Instagram and Vine. VW created a Beetle convertible that will be used as an underwater cage hooked up to cameras for the remainder of the week, hoping to conquer a chunk of the digital space floating around with these exclusive videos. Credits after the jump.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.