• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 13, 2012

Walter Lord’s slim, gripping A Night To Remember was a staple on many high school reading lists a generation (or so) ago and it provided about all I ever thought I’d ever want to know about the mishap at sea that carried the larger moral lesson that pride goeth before an iceberg. Well, we may have all learned early that “The Titanic wasn't unsinkable, but there's no keeping down the marketing on the eve of its big day,” as Ben Casselman and Ann Zimmerman put it in the Wall Street Journal this morning.

Because the world was so similar in some ways –- automobiles were beginning to populate paved streets, mass market brands like Corn Flakes and Ivory Soap were thriving and J. Walter Thompson, whose founder was a commodore of the New York Yacht Club and fond of posing in his officer’s cap, was doing just fine in its third decade -- it’s hard to imagine how different things were 100 years ago. Silent pictures. No commercial radio or television. No Kardashians. And the Boston Red Sox were a better team than the New York Yankees.

Perhaps that dichotomy is why fascination about the event that took more than 1,500 lives while “the band played on” seems to have hit a fevered pitch. James Cameron re-released his epic movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, “The Titanic” in 3D last weekend. Although it was third in sales in the U.S., it topped the box office in the UK, as well as Russia and China (where, alas, viewers got “less boob for their buck,” as the Aussie’s MovieFix reports, because censors feared that “viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people's viewing.” 

On a different tack, marketing agency Printwand has an interesting take on the White Star Line’s marketing plan for the Titanic, which it points out was “was both wildly effective and tragically flawed.” It draws from lessons from the latter, the first being “be realistic.” If you’re not unsinkable, in other words, don’t go embellishing and exaggerating.

Also, “be wary of word of mouth” which, “with today’s social media frenzy … is more significant than ever.” It seems a lot of passengers heard from a friend who heard from a friend that the ship was too big to go down.

The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott, meanwhile, takes a look at the fittingly “big” corporations that are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the sinking, including Acura, CBS, Walt Disney, Gannett, Geico, the National Geographic Society, News Corp., PBS, the Smithsonian Institution, Time Warner, the Tribune Co., Viacom and The New York Times itself. 

Elliott maintains that “mania contrasts with what happened almost 15 years ago, the last time the ship was so much a part of the vernacular” when Cameron’s movie, the winner of 11 Academy Awards, was first released. It’s success “left marketers scrambling to create product tie-ins,” Elliott wrote back in the day.

Chris Johns, editor in chief of National Geographic, tells Elliott that the combined print and digital sales of the current issue with the Titanic on the cover could be “our biggest-selling one ever.” 

“Might the centennial of the sinking represent a, er, um, high-water mark for Titanic mania?” Elliott asks. But National Geographic Channels U.S. CEO David Lyle points out that “… Cameron said every generation rediscovers the Titanic. Who knows where we might be in another 10 or 15 years?” 

Even New York’s Chelsea Piers, now a sports and entertainment complex, is trying to get into the game.

“The significance of Pier 59 is that this is where the Carpathia landed with the lifeboats from the Titanic,” Dana Thayer, marketing director of Chelsea Piers, tells CBS New York. ”It was actually the pier that the Titanic was headed to.”

It’s now a driving range. But commercialism of the tragedy is not limited to crass commercial outlets. 

“New museums recently opened in Belfast, where the Titanic was built, and in Southampton, England, where the ship set out on its fateful maiden voyage,” report Casseman and Zimmerman. “Memorial events are being held in Cherbourg, France, where the ship headed from Southampton, and Cobh, Ireland, its final port of call, as well as Cape Race, Newfoundland, which received the ship's distress signals.”

But at least those locales can claim some connection to the event. The WSJ reporters also write about a re-creation of the final first-class meal aboard the ship in a theater in St. Louis, a gala at the H. Lee White Marine Museum on the banks of treacherous (really!) Lake Ontario, and QVC’s sales of items such as $69 bottles of “Legacy 1912 Titanic Fragrance” Eau de Parfum.

An exhibit curated by Dr. Robert Ballard, the man who first found the Titanic “12,450 Feet Below” the surface of the Atlantic 27 years ago, has opened at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Ballard is particularly concerned about the damage that subsequent submariners are doing to the site.

“We have a mosaic on the wall over here and if you look up at the forward mast you can see where those submarines are landing, they’re crushing the deck,” he tells WCBS 880’s Fran Schneidau. “We have no trouble or any problem with people visiting the Titanic. But you don’t stick your finger in Mona Lisa when you go to the Louvre.” 

As much as we snickered, maybe the Chinese censors have it right after all.