The new Batman movies have been a huge success, not many people have bad things to say about them. Even bigger success has been the marketing of these movies. The marketers behind these movies are brilliant, The Dark Knight had a viral campaign called 'Why So Serious?' and the success of it had never been seen before. Chicago was seen by fans as 'Gotham City', the campaign spread across the world so quickly and gained followers everywhere who supported Joker or the Gotham police force and marched down the streets of various cities presenting their commitment. The way it was done was very clever and here's a video explaining how it all got done:
The third movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is scheduled to come out June 2012. It's expected to be even more popular than The Dark Knight and the viral campaign has started already. There are a few videos that can be found on YouTube that show Gotham burning on Gotham City News and there's chanting on the background for the new villain Bane. There is also a clip that reveals the character Bane pixel by pixel
There's a lot of debating around different websites about whether or not these clips are part of the new viral campaign for the new movie or whether they are just user generated videos by the biggest Batman fans. I don't think it really matters because it has already created such a hype online and it's only about to get bigger. It might just be a very smart move from the marketers since the campaign for The Dark Knight was a huge success all over the world. Considering that the previous campaign was launched in 2008 and how much social media has grown since then, this campaign could be better than ever!
On their Facebook page, The Dark Knight Rises has just over 192,000 likes whereas The Dark Knight page holds over 8 million likes. It'll be interesting to see the figures in 6months time...Personally, I can't wait for the movie to come out and I might just go and Like the page right know to see how this campaign turns out.
User generated content, exactly what the marketers want. I wouldn't be surprised if they picked the biggest batman fans and gave them a few clips without any instructions on what to do with them. What will these fans do? Well they will want to show the world that they were the first to get their hands on this, and what a better way to do it than through SM.
ReplyDeleteYou as an example have just helped these marketers by further spreading the word on this blog!
SM is GREAT!
Ross
With such a huge pop culture following will there even be a need to take the promotion of the new movie to 'mainstream' media? What I'm interested in seeing is how they keep the 'momentum' alive over the next 6 months, do they continue to feed 'sound bites' or let the fans do the entire job for them? If you were the marketing manager would your strategy have several 'tactical plans' depending on the direction or would it be a focused roll out with the view that you want to control the direction of the campaign? Either way I look forward to seeing it unfold.
ReplyDeleteMike
It's probably smart to try and keep in charge of the campaign by giving little bits and pieces out every now and then in order to keep even the ones who are not too involved still interested. Social media is probably the easiest platform for promoting the movie but mass media is still mass media. Everyone will be expecting for the marketing to go mainstream and it will reach the ones who are left out of the social media campaign. It'll be interesting to see if the marketers come up with something that hasn't been seen yet..
ReplyDelete