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I won’t go on about the film or the politics in the new Batman movie (all I’ll say is it’s managed to surpass anyone’s expectations which, let’s face it, for a blockbuster with some serious thought behind it is pretty good).

What has caught my attention is all the digital marketing that was worked on to promote the movie. Unfortunately a lot of this didn’t actively make it to UK shores however thanks to, of course, the internet we can get a glimpse of what went on across the pond.

What is so great about the viral marketing is that it really wasn’t technologically amazing, advanced or footage of millions of people putting Mentos into Coke bottles. With the knowledge that they had one of the most amazing comic-book villains on screen, it was easy to see how they could not capitalise on that.

One main thing to bear in mind is that movies do take a while from conception to competition. So it’s no surprise that the first glimpses of their strategic campaign began more than a year ago from the movies release.

The first site to go up was

http://www.ibelieveinharveydent.com/

In conjunction with that, posters went up around the streets of LA that promoted Harvey Dent’s electoral campaign.

When you signed up to the website you were sent an email saying:

“I always say you only really get to know a man when you peel the flesh from his face one piece at a time. Here’s you chance to help.”

The email gave you co-ordinates on the website that you could put in to reveal a pixel from the site. Of course this was the peer to peer element to get as many users to sign up and start removing pixels from the site. The image underneath was Heath Ledger as the new Joker.

 

Once the image was revealed (around 24 hours) the page was taken down and the defaced website you see today was put up. In conjunction with that, all the posters around LA were given the same treatment too.

 

http://www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com/ was also revealed. Initially it looks like an error page but start highlighting the page and it reveals thousands of ‘haha’s’. When you remove the h and a’s, you got a message saying ‘See you in December’.

This is just a glimpse into what they did; they also created an Alternate Reality Game where they gave locations for users to go and collect clues. Another example was a chance to upload your images as the joker onto a site (creating the Joker’s army I think was the aim). The faux political rallies for Harvey Dent was another idea used. The list is amazing and a very good example of what can be produced and how to get users involved.

I’m putting in all the links (that I know of) for you all to go wander around and play with. Writing about them and their strategies would take forever.

http://www.whysoserious.com/

http://www.thegothamtimes.com/ (this one is really good, hover your mouse over the top left hand side)

http://www.whysoserious.com/myhero/

http://www.wearetheanswer.org/

http://www.rorysdeathkiss.com (the name comes from the working title for the movie)

http://maidenavenuereport.com/

http://gothamcablenews.com

http://www.whysoserious.com/steprightup/ (for the ARG)

I hope this can give you an idea of the lengths they went to promote the movie. So what was the end result? Batman is now the 3^rd highest grossing film after Titanic and the original Star Wars movies.

So there you go, a lot of though, effort and having an incredibly strong brand can result in some amazing results when peer to peer is used correctly.

Now to those of you who haven’t watched the movie, shame on you go see it!

*sources: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/viral-marketing-what-works-what.php

http://catchupblog.typepad.com/catch_up_blog/2007/05/buzz_in_the_blo.html

http://www.altogetherdigital.com/20071213/new-batman-dark-knight-marketing-continues-fantastic/

A humorous and well executed campaign for Finnair.