Creepiest network marketing effort ever?

Networks send you things. T-shirts, hats, pens, cups branded with show titles. Sometimes they go for clever: An energy drink for TNT's "high energy" drama "Leverage," candy "whale meat" for Animal Planet's "Whale Wars." Sometimes the tie-in is a total strikeout (I don't think any parent is going to give their kid a lunchbox covered with photos of Fox Reality's hunky "House Husbands of Hollywood," below).

But today was the first time a network ever truly creeped me out.

An unmarked box arrived containing a frosted, seemingly rusted jar. Inside was a pair of swim trunks, "chewed" up and bloody-looking; a key attached to a flotation disk, as if for a boat, and a few other weathered, nautical items.

But the centerpiece was the crumpled newspaper clipping of my own obituary.

 "James Hibberd, Senior TV Reporter and Senior Online Editor of the Hollywood Reporter died Monday, July 6, of a grisly shark attack..."

There's nothing like reading a pronouncement of your own death to give you pause.

This is Discovery Channel's way of promoting its annual "Shark Week" to reporters. The accompanying obit had a career summary, though with a couple publication names misspelled in a presumably intentional small-daily-paper touch. It's as if the network hired David Fincher to do their PR.

Given one THR editor's utterly horrified reaction to the idea of a network announcing the death of her reporter, I have to wonder if some recipients of this package might be offended. (I mean, yeah, Discovery has wanted to kill me before, but sending bloody trunks and a well-researched obituary is waaay more impactful than angry phone calls.) Another blogger's reaction to the PR stunt is here.

One of the items is stamped with a URL that goes to the next phase of this marketing effort -- www.frenziedwaters.com -- which is worth checking out, giving you a first-person video of, well, you'll see.

"I love it, I think it's great," says one PR executive at an unrelated company about the Discovery campaign. "And the reason I love it is because you're writing about it."