Marketing and Movies: The Dark Knight

Where does the movie end, and reality begin?

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Now that the commercials are out of the way, on to today’s Feature Presentation!

The Darker Shade of the Knight

Today’s edition of Marketing and Movies will feature spoilers from Christopher Nolan’s masterwork, The Dark Knight. IMO this is the finest movie based off a comic book, although I’m sure an argument could be made for others. Leave a comment if you have another choice!

The original Batman film from 1989 was a critical and commercial success. In particular, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Batman nemesis The Joker, as well as director Tim Burton’s efforts were particularly praised. So when it was announced that the Batman series reboot would again feature The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, many fans were rightly skeptical of actor Heath Ledger’s ability to match the performance that Jack Nicholson had brought to the character two decades before.

Ledger proved up to the task, not only meeting but surpassing the work of the screen legend Nicholson. Ledger’s performance of The Joker was simply a masterwork, his work dominated the film and made you believe you were actually watching an insane serial killer. Ledger was that scary good:

In this scene, Joker does give Batman the addresses for both Rachel Dawes and Harvey Dent. But he switched the addresses on purpose. The location of Rachel was really where he was holding Harvey Dent, and vice versa. He knew that Batman would want to rescue Rachel, and he knew that Batman would reach her before the police could reach Dent. Joker also left a phone with both Rachel and Dent so they could talk to each other. On the phone, Dent tells Rachel not to worry, that Batman will come to rescue her. Then Rachel hears on the phone that Batman arrives to rescue Dent, who is screaming that he is supposed to be rescuing Rachel. The bombs attached to her then go off. She dies believing that Batman chose to rescue Dent instead of her.

As I said, Ledger’s performance as a serial killer was scary good.

Besides Ledger’s outstanding performance, the film focuses on the idea of rules and boundaries. Throughout his history as a character, Batman has had two strict rules that the character lives by. The first is Batman doesn’t carry or use a gun, and he doesn’t kill.

In the first film of the trilogy, Batman Begins, this was enough. Batman kept the criminal element in Gotham at bay by beating them senseless. But in The Dark Knight, the Joker changed things. He took over Gotham’s underworld by killing anyone that stood in his way.

In one scene Batman interrogates a mobster about Joker. The mobster tells Batman that he can’t threaten him anymore. He says all he (Batman) can do is beat him up. But Joker could kill him.

In the above video, Joker remarks on Batman’s rule against killing, and as Batman is beating him up, Joker starts laughing hysterically, and says “You have nothing to threaten me with!’ Meaning that both of them know that Batman’s rules mean a few punches is all Joker will get.

In fact, Joker spends the entire film attempting to convince the main players to compromise their principles. He tried and failed with Batman. But he was more successful with Harvey Dent. The kidnapping of Dent and Rachel Dawes was set up so that Dent would believe that the police (and Batman) left Rachel to die. Also, Dent was horribly injured and half his face was severely burned during his rescue.

As a result, Dent confronts Commissioner Gordon and threatens to kill his family. Which leads to Batman saving them, and Dent falls to his death in the process.

But, this also means that when the public finds out what Dent had become, there would be intense pressure to undo much of the work Dent had done before his accident to jail criminals in Gotham. Many of those criminals would likely go free now.

So the Joker had forced Batman and Commissioner Gordon into another instance of pushing them to compromise their principles. Both decided that it was best for Gotham if Harvey Dent died a hero in the eyes of the public. And Batman would be the villain that the police would then chase.

It could be argued that the Joker ‘won’ regardless of the choice Batman and Gordon made. As I said, Ledger’s performance as the film’s antagonist was scary good.

As it turns out, the marketing for The Dark Knight was scary good as well. I wrote about one aspect of the film’s phenomenal marketing campaign in my book Think Like a Rock Star:

Sometimes the best marketing doesn’t ‘look’ like marketing at all. When Warner Bros. was promoting the movie The Dark Knight, it put together all the standard online and offline marketing promotions that you would expect to see for a summer blockbuster.

But the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight also had an element of ‘fun’ to it. Warner Bros. created an elaborate online marketing campaign, one element of which required you to ‘decode’ online websites that tied into the movie. If you were the first person from your area to decipher the website, you would be given the address of a local bakery that was holding a cake for you to pick up under the name Robbin Banks (robbin’ banks, get it?).

When you received the cake, the icing said ‘Call Me Now’ and included a phone number. If you dialed the number, the cake itself started ringing! Inside the cake there was a packet containing a cell phone and other items from the company Rent A Clown, apparently set up by Batman’s arch-enemy in the movie, The Joker! Campaigns such as this were great fun for fans of The Dark Knight, and helped create a lot of extra buzz around the film.

Here’s the cake that you received for solving the puzzle:

Keep in mind this was done in 2008, just as YouTube was starting to take off, so The Dark Knight was one of the first films to really leverage UGC to help virally promote the film online.

Also note that such a campaign isn’t aimed at casual fans of the franchise, but rather at fans that were already invested in the film as soon as it was announced. These fans are more loyal to the film and loved the idea of ‘solving a riddle’ to figure out the online puzzle, then to get the reward of getting the cake AND the phone and materials inside. The marketing is giving an incentive to the winner of the puzzle to promote the film even further. If you won one of these cakes, you wanted to brag about it, you wanted to share with your friends on social media, which simply leads to more promotion of the film, for free!

Amazingly, this was one of the tamer elements of The Dark Knight’s viral marketing campaign. The film launched an insanely elaborate ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for the film. Including dozens of ‘fake’ websites, a scavenger hunt at the San Diego Comic Con that saw 650,000(!) attendees attend. The film boasted the most popular ARG of all-time, and the marketing campaign reached over 11 Million people.

Here’s an exhaustive recap of the entire campaign:

If you somehow haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, please watch it ASAP. Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Dark Knight and this film left the world with a complete understanding of what a brilliant talent he truly was.

That’s it for this edition of Backstage Pass. Thursday will feature the Monthly Marketing Minute with some interesting tech and social media news! See you then!

Mack

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Backstage Pass teaches you how to better connect with your customers, readers, clients, or donors. The lessons shared here draw on my experience over the last 20 years building customer engagement strategies for companies like Adobe, Dell, Club Med, Ingersoll-Rand, and countless others. I give you real-world research, examples and tactics that show you how to create customer engagement efforts that drive real business growth.

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