Friday, 16 December 2011

The Dark Knight Rises: Viral Marketing Campaign

The viral marketing campaign for the film ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’ was very successful. It generated interest and expectation for the film through an online game which had clues hidden within it. Players were able to view the first ever released trailer for the film and became involved with the experience and interested in seeing the film. Through ‘word-of-mouth’, fans from around the world were attracted to the campaign as it included exclusive pictures and trailers. The new Batman film ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is due for release on 20 July 2012 and a viral marketing campaign has already been launched which is hoped to be even more successful than the last.

The first step of the campaign was to set up a website by the name of ‘thefirerises’ -  the word means nothing yet, but is probably a reference to something within the film. The website which was created had a black background accompanied with chanting. The team behind the website had thought that it would have taken the Batman fans ages to work out the riddle but in fact it only took a matter of minutes - someone had worked out that you need to run the chanting through a visualizer which then reveals the hash tag #thefirerises. This hash tag then leads to the Twitter account @thefirerises featuring the first image from the film. The image is of the villainous character Bane, played by the actor Tom Hardy. He is pictured against a black background, with his back to the camera, whilst looking straight at the lens. He appears to be naked from the waist up and is wearing some kind of mask (see below).



As the campaign continued more footage from the film was released in the form of teaser trailers, as were images of the official teaser poster and an image of Catwoman (played by Anne Hathaway) riding the Batbike (see above).

The links below show some video footage which I class as a must see:

The director also quite likes leaked videos of the film, as it helps build up hype among the fans of Batman. For example:

No comments:

Post a Comment