Creating Ad Campaigns: Research

According to the well-known user updated website, Wikipedia, Warner Brothers launched their official website to represent The Dark Knight Rises in May 2011. They took advantage of the website’s popularity to start a viral marketing campaign. This was done by when a user was to open up the website, an “encrypted audio file” was played (which has been described by users as a chanting sound). When the audio file was “decrypted”, it would give a link to the film’s official twitter account. This would then lead to every time a person would comment on the social network account, a pixel would then be removed from the website to in turn, reveal the first official image of a character known as Bane. This would give people an insight to the latest enemy that Batman could be facing.

Basing on the information from The Week (http://theweek.com/article/index/227422/the-dark-knight-rises-awesomely-complex-viral-marketing-campaign), the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight Rises was a complicated one. Another strategy Warner Brothers used was to tell fans that to see one of the trailers, they would have to help the Gotham City Police Department (who are known for the police department in the previous Batman movies) locate Batman by tracking down hundreds of pieces of graffiti around the world. For each time a fan found a piece of graffiti and tagged it on a social media network, Warner Brothers would unlock a frame from the trailer. This led to very excited fans unlocking the whole trailer in a matter of hours.

Using the same source, I found out that people had managed to find all of the graffiti because Warner Brothers had posted the exact street addresses of more than 300 locations worldwide, which included places in Australia, China, Holland, and the US.

Personally, I’m not sure that The Dark Knight Rises needed so much of a marketing campaign as they had made such an impression with the first two movies that the third would seem to be such a good movie too. At the end of the day, it does no harm creating a lot of hype and excitement with fans that eagerly wait for the movie’s release.

It seems apparent that Warner Brothers had been following the strategy of its previous Batman movie, The Dark Knight, with the viral marketing. This is most likely because of the success it had on the movie it was promoting.