More confirmation that the marketing efforts for the Dark Knight will continue as planned, reported in BrandWeek:
“Promotional partners are standing by their programs and reportedly won’t need to scrap any related marketing materials. The reason: they did not focus on the ghoulish Joker character, instead preferring to center their campaigns on the hero, Batman.
“That’s been the norm for brand/movie tie-ins for years, with corporate partners choosing not to align too closely with the bad guys.”
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.
