Interesting interview!
Like if I were to put the Megalodon show on air, honestly Nat Geo Wild would get crickets, like I couldn't… my audience doesn't expect that from us...
So right now, what we're doing with Shark Fest – I'm shamelessly letting Discovery do all the work for me. They've chummed the waters. They've brought in a huge number of people, by the way, most of whom don't give a hoot about natural history at all, or about animals in that sense. But they're pulling a big group of people and look, I'm running right under them with a very sort of tongue in cheek marketing campaign that is actually taking a poke at them...
And when people come and they go oh, it's a shark, and then they stick on our network… we're starting to see people who are really appreciative of the difference [between Shark Fest and Shark Week] and are noticing that difference more and more. And they're saying "oh wow, they're not megalodon-ing me, they're actually giving me the real story behind those amazing animals in a way that just feels different to me."...
But the most important thing, sort of bringing it full circle, is we have to be true.
And I think that that takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of vision and leadership to be willing to have the courage of your convictions and to stand in there while everybody is running one way to say, "this may not be the quickest path to success, but I'm certain that if we stay there that we will create this loyal core of viewers and online followers that will start to evangelize for the network and start to tell their friends and start to tell their families, and that over time will grow."
And so I actually think that the path to positive activism is through emotional engagement. And I think that you can't do that by putting on heavy hitting, dire, guilt-ridden awfulness, because people see that every night on the news.
For me, the mission is about making people fall in love, to fall in love with that animal, to fall in love with that place. And then giving them the outlets and the opportunity to then, in their own way and in their own time, come into the tent and be inspired, to engage on deeper and deeper levels, whatever that level is. Because at the end of the day, I don't need everybody to become fire breathing activists.
Well said - but is this for real?
Time will tell. At this stage, this all very much smells like a thinly veiled marketing exercise that capitalizes on the fact that Discovery appears to have totally lost the plot. Granted the Nat Geo Wild programs, whilst still utilizing plenty of sensationalist language and fake drama are thankfully not quite as totally moronic as some of the latest shit by DC - but they're still light years away from, say, the BBC, and the breathy claim of being committed to telling the truth is only valid in comparative, and certainly not in absolute terms.
And Discovery?
Word on the street is that Eileen has been sacked and that everything is on hold as they all figure out what's next. I'm not at all hopeful that this may be an indication of serious soul searching and re-orientation - but who knows.
We shall be watching!
