Viral Marketing Campaign for the Dark Knight to Continue?
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article in yesterday’s issue: Will Marketing Change After Star’s Death? The article does a nice job of summing up the viral campaign used to promote the next Batman installment, The Dark Knight. The studio used Health Ledger’s “playful but psychotic” The Joker character as the star of the viral campaign, despite the fact that Christian Bale returns as the title character. And, “Mr. Ledger isn’t featured just in the online campaign. The movie’s current poster includes a ghostly and haunting image of Mr. Ledger in his Joker getup, with the tag line ‘Why So Serious?’ scrawled in red.”
The question is, with the untimely death of the movie’s featured star/character, will the studio continue this successful viral initiative? The studio hasn’t responded to the status of the film or marketing campaign, they have simply released a statement expressing its condolences on Mr. Ledger’s death. A source quoted by the Journal recommends that “the best that could happen is that all this marketing stuff just goes on and the move and the campaign don’t turn into some kind of grave marker.”
All of Ledger’s fans will just have to wait and see, but the viral campaign has certainly intrigued me into anxiously awaiting the film’s release this summer.
The marketing of the film, currently in post-production, has been thrown into turmoil, the trade paper Variety notes.
The early push for the film has focused on Ledger’s villainous Joker character, including a poster with a shrouded Joker scrawling “Why So Serious?” in blood on misty glass.
The film’s studio, Warner Bros., recently restructured its marketing department, Variety reports, after the departure of the executive who helped create the “Dark Knight” campaign.
The trade paper speculates that the marketing campaign will be changed abruptly. I personally think they will end up focusing on the Batman character for the remainder of the campaign as the release date approaches, then through media channels spin it to be a celebration Heath Ledger’s last performance and numbers will sky rocket.
I think it would be impossible to measure the effect of his death on the numbers of the film because, first it’s a sequel of a of an already successful franchise, and second it’s was already going to have a huge turnout being released in the middle of a blockbuster summer.
So we might not be able to see the effects, or at least measure them, but they will be there. I bet the week before the release Heath Ledger’s death pops back up in the news on every media outlet.
Comment by Mr. Smarty Pants — January 26, 2008 @ 11:41 am
[...] on February 1, 2008 by lanceturner Ms. Adverthinker, a local advertising/marketing blogger, has been thinking on this, and now Slate magazine wonders how film execs will market “The Dark Knight” after the [...]
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