Viral Advertising

For the 2008 film, Dark Knight, the viral advertising used created a kind of alternate reality game whereby the whole world could witness and new fans could be drawn in. Some of these methods included:

• gatherings of Joker, Batman and Harvey Dent fans
• scavenger hunts around the world websites that let fans ‘vote’ for political offices in Gotham City
• hidden phone numbers and websites in the queue lines of The Dark Knight roller coasters at Six Flags Great America and Six Flags Great Adventure
• Gotham News Network has links to other Gotham pages such as Gotham Rail, a Gotham travel agency, and political candidate's pages.
• a fake web page was set up for Gotham Cabs, a website for Gotham News, and even the subway in Gotham City.

Each of these methods created a buzz around the film and were brought into the mainstream culture by word of mouth, ultimately resulting in a widespread knowledge of these campaigns as well as the hype about the film itself.

Below is a video detailing the viral campaign for Dark Knight in its entirety, demonstrating the effectiveness it had on the awareness of the film.

Pictured below is a small group of fans dressed Jokers, demonstrating against Harvey Dent in the fake election.

The idea of an alternate reality game, in which aspects of the film come to life, is an idea which hugely benefitted the profit of the film at the box office, as well as making a memorable viral advertising campaign. We could use a similar idea, whereby the idea of our remote control being real could be incorporated into a fake advert. This would allow people to wonder about the great idea behind having a remote that could rewind time and possibly be therefore interested in watching our film after being exposed to the idea.

A website was created for the campaign, using The Joker's tagline 'why so serious?' at whysoserious.com

Pictured above is the fake news campaign being recorded for the fake website of the fake election of Gotham City. We could do exactly the same thing with our remote control having an advert and even it's own fake website.

Although the Dark Knight film mainly appealed to existing Batman fans, new fans were founded through the hype of the extraordinary campaign. As our film would be a new film and not have an existing franchise to fall back on, it would be harder for us to create a buzz for our film as we would not have the existing fans to entice the new fans. Although it would be harder, it would not be impossible because the remote control idea would appeal to everyone; everyone has had moments when they wish that they could rewind time. Perhaps the film itself and romantic-comedy genre would not appeal to everyone, but if we could expose as many people as possible to the advert, we have a good chance of extracting possible fans of our film.