The Dark Knight Movie Campaign
In addition to the marketing posters and trailers, the advertising team created a viral campaign that engaged viewers with different forms of media. "Why So Serious?" was designed as a 360° alternate reality experience that played out over 15 months leading up to the release. They used the internet, newspapers and gave out cell phones to help people decode the game and become a citizen of Gotham City. They gave fans the chance to directly involve themselves in the world of Gotham from helping Harvey Dent become District Attorney to serving as henchmen in the Joker’s army to joining Citizens for Batman. The campaign spilled over into the real world as fans called phone numbers written in the sky, found phones the Joker left for them inside birthday cakes, and helped project the Batman signal on buildings in New York City and Chicago. It was a groundbreaking immersive campaign for a movie. The video below looks at many of the different pieces that went into the campaign that helped it become as popular as it did.
​Why So Serious?
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Results:
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11 Million Participants from over 75 countries
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Generated billions of impressions in the press and blogosphere
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Highest Advanced pre-sales ever
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Grossed over $530 million domestically and over $1 billion worldwide
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Cannes Lions Cyber Grand Prix Award and the Silver Cyber Award
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Best supporting actor Oscar for Heath Ledger
The Dark Knight was released in July 2008 and opened to record numbers at the box office. A lot of that success can be attributed to the marketing campaign. The campaign centered around three main marketing aspects that include a poster campaign, engaging trailers, and finally a viral real life game where users could interact with the content online and in real life. The poster and TV ad campaigns focused heavily on the Joker and showcased some of the chaos that viewers could expect to see in theaters. They started these campaigns by only having his voice during the first promos, and then showed his actual character in later promos. This built up excitement and anticipation for Heath Ledger's performance and interpretation of the character especially after his unfortunate passing. Warner Bro's, the studio behind the film, created a coherent campaign that emphasized that the main draw of the movie would be the joker. The campaign also created a consistent feel and theme to the promotional materials with the dark blue tones, and Batman mostly absent from the promotions.