And a dracula moon in a black disguise was making its way back to its pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel
The billboards arrived without fanfare or explanation in more than a dozen major cities last May [2007]. Bearing two simple catch phrases, “Harvey Dent for district attorney” and “I believe in Harvey Dent,” they featured a photo of a stately Dent (imagine Eliot Spitzer with a shock of blond hair) against an American flag.
But within 72 hours, each billboard had been defaced by identical graffiti: The candidate’s eyes were scrawled over with black rings, his lips crudely rouged with a smeary, clown-like grin. As well, each of the placards’ messages had been altered to read: “I believe in Harvey Dent TOO.”
Although not outwardly advertising anything other than Dent’s political aspirations, the billboards were in fact the opening salvo of one of the most interactive movie-marketing campaigns ever hatched by Hollywood: a multi-platform, hidden-in-plain-sight promotional blitz for the new Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” which stars Christian Bale and Heath Ledger and reaches theaters on July 18 [, 2008].
By employing a variety of untraditional awareness-building maneuvers and starting the film’s promo push strategically, more than a year before the film’s release, marketers at the firm 42 Entertainment (subcontracted by the film’s distributor, Warner Bros.) seem to have struck a chord with “The Dark Knight’s” core constituency: fanboys and comic-book geeks. The promotional efforts — part viral marketing initiative, part “advertainment” — fit into an absorbing, nascent genre-bending pastime called alternate reality gaming that have been the toast of movie and comic blogs for months. (…)
“The Dark Knight’s” alternate reality game (ARG for short) is mashing up advertising, scavenger-hunting and role-playing in a manner that variously recalls “The X-Files” and the play “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” “The Matrix” and the board game Clue — all in the name of galvanizing a community of fans to bond (with the new Batman and each other) over the course of a wild goose chase.
Or to be more precise, a wild Joker chase — one that so far has involved clues spelled out in skywriting, secret meeting points, cellphones embedded inside cakes, Internet red herrings, DIY fan contests and even fake political rallies. Moreover, last week several players were nearly arrested in Chicago while engaging in civil disobedience to promote the movie; others have even been “kidnapped” and “murdered” over the course of the game. (…)
In December, conscientious followers noted a mysterious countdown on WhySoSerious.com that instructed viewers to travel to 22 real-world addresses in cities from coast to coast to pick up a “very special treat” under the name “Robin Banks”. Turns out the addresses were bakeries in possession of a number of cakes bearing phone numbers spelled out in icing.
related { walking up the side of a building }
