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MOVIES Interactive movie-marketing stirs interest in 'Dark Knight' By Chris Lee Tribune Newspapers March 30, 2008 LOS ANGELES The billboards arrived without fanfare or explanation in more than a dozen major cities last May. 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, clownlike 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 (never mind the impossibility of running for DA in more than one city), the billboards were in fact the opening salvo of one of the most interactive movie-marketing campaigns ever hatched by Hollywood: a multiplatform, hidden-in-plain-sight promotional blitz for the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight," which stars Christian Bale and Heath Ledger and reaches theaters in July. Alternate reality gaming 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" is hardly the only summer action flick to step up its Internet game in anticipation of the tent-pole season: Trailers for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" are spreading across the Web like kudzu since being turned into "widgets" small, portable applications that can be posted on social networking sites and blogs by marketers for its distributor, Paramount. Earlier this month, HarperCollins Children's Books launched a "read it before you see it" global digital campaign tying in the film "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" with the C.S. Lewis children's classic from which it was adapted. And then there's good, old-fashioned movie salesmanship: The trailer for "Iron Man" has been streamed 3.7 million times on Yahoo Movies since it was launched in September. A cultural event So to stand out, "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, cell phones embedded inside cakes, Internet red herrings, DIY fan contests and even fake political rallies. Befitting the campaign's covert-ops MO, neither Warner Bros. nor 42 Entertainment would comment for this story. But as Jonathan Waite, founder of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network (argn.com) sees it, "The Dark Knight's" multifaceted promo push transcends marketing to exist as a stand-alone cultural event. "This is looked upon as viral marketing, but you have to look at it as an engrossing experience you have people getting very attached to the game," Waite said. "You're not a passive onlooker; you're taking an active role. And any time you take an active role, you're emotionally connecting. That's why people keep coming back: You make personal connections with others, and a community gets built." Take back Gotham City As any Bat-fanatic will tell you, the Dent propaganda is meant to conjure Batman's "Dark Knight" nemesis, Two Face (a role memorably embodied by Tommy Lee Jones in 1995's "Batman Forever;" Two Face is played by Aaron Eckhart in the new movie). Early in the "Dark Knight" marketing campaign, an official Web site for the film redirected viewers to ibelieveinharveydent.com a URL notably lacking any references to Batman that urges "concerned Gotham citizens" to "take back Gotham City" by backing the candidate's run for district attorney. More specifically, it tells them how to get involved in a faux grass-roots political campaign through initiatives such as filming videos, writing "Take Back Gotham" songs and coming out to meet the "Dentmobile," now touring several dozen American cities. Another site, www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com provides a clue about some connection between the Joker and Two Face that will presumably be explained in the film. Discovering it takes work. Call up the site, and you'll see a blacked-out page with the message: "Page not found." But pull down "select all" from your browser's edit menu, and a none-too-subtle shout-out to the killer clown is revealed: a pages-long sequence of repeating Ha ha ha's. There's also a message embedded within the chuckles. "I've never been a fan of the Batman series," writes a poster on the marketing-analysis blog "Catch Up Lady," "but this sort of thing makes me want to go see it." Strategy isn't new Of course, moviedom's paradigm has been shifted by high-impact, low-cost viral marketing campaigns before. Promos for the 1999 indie thriller "The Blair Witch Project" led viewers to believe the movie was a student film gone horribly wrong, resulting in the disappearance and possible murder of a group of Maryland college students. Likewise, stealth Internet marketing for this year's alien-invasion hit "Cloverfield" tantalized moviegoers by keeping them guessing about the movie's subject matter. Wired magazine contributing editor Frank Rose has extensively covered the world of alternate reality gaming and credits the "Cloverfield" ARG campaign with helping the film surpass all box office expectations (hauling in nearly $50 million in its opening weekend). The debut of its "top-secret" trailer last July caused a sensation, compelling moviegoers to take to the Net to uncover a host of interlinking Web sites and viral tie-ins. But Rose feels "Cloverfield" marketers failed to sustain that early critical mass of interest through the film's January release, ultimately squandering its full viral potential. "It had what looked like was going to be an ARG behind it, but then it fizzled out," Rose said. "Although there was a lot of comment about 'Cloverfield' online, with people looking for clues and debating the clues, things died down and didn't start to heat up again until before the movie was released. That's an example of what a not terribly well-executed ARG can do." Los Angeles Times Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
