HaHaHa

The Recruitment

On December 3^rd 2008, Jack, a teenager in United States was browsing through an upcoming movie website. A new page appeared in the site which had a hammer game and teddy bear toys. Each toy had an address on it located in a number of cities around the US. The note on the game asked him to go to a specific address where he would get something special. It was first come, first serve. Jack was supposed to say his name was Robbin Banks. He went to the location and it turned out to be a Bakery. After saying the code name he was given a cake which had a phone number written on it along with the note “call me now”. After calling the number there was cell phone noise coming from the cake. Jack dug up the cake to find a cell phone, a joker card and a note !! it read as follows

“Wow, you really took the cake! Now, put the icing on it: call (phone number) immediately from this phone and THIS PHONE ONLY. Do NOT give this phone number to anyone else. Let's hope your fellow goons come through as well as you. Once all the layers are in place, you'll all get your just desserts. I'm a man of my word” 

Upon calling the number on the note, an audio message followed:

"Thank you for calling Rent-a-Clown! Now we know who you are!"

A text message is also received from humanresources@whysoserious.com:

“Good work, clown! Keep this phone charged and with you at all times. Don't call me, I'll call you...eventually hahahaha”...

Well no prices for guessing the name for which this publicity stunt was pulled. This was part of a sequence of events in “The Dark Knight” marketing campaign. At this phase, the Joker has now real people recruited to his army who are awaiting his call!!  

Marketing of The Dark knight

The marketing for the movie was based on the concept of Alternate Reality Game. The primary objective of the campaign was to tell the audience (mostly the fans of the franchise) the story of what happened between the end of Batman Begins and the beginning of The Dark Knight. This had to be done while making them feel as if they are part of this story. In other words, creating an alternate reality based on the fictional Gotham city and empowering them as citizens. Gotham city was simulated by creating websites for various institutions like Cab company, Churches, TV stations and Subway. 

The campaign had several phases starting with the revelation of the Joker’s face to the launch of the fictional “Gotham Times” newspaper to the Ringing cakes stunt to the Election rally for one of the movie character Harvey Dent. The objective was to increase the number of people exposed to the movie with each phase. 

One more amazing example of how the campaign simulated the movie world is the “Harvey Dent Campaign challenge”. It was launched to draw female audiences as they thought the actor playing this character had high appeal among them.The campaign required participants to submit their contact information on the Ibelieveinharveydent.com site. The site was regularly updated with instructions on how to go about supporting the Harvey Dent. It also used live audio content in the form of phone calls in which  pre recorded voice of Harvey Dent instructed the participants about how and when to organise public rallies !! It was a success since the audience participation increased by 38% at this stage of which most of them were women.

Result

Till Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the movie held the record for the biggest opening weekend revenue of all time at $158.4 million. Nearly 10 million participated in the marketing through mobile content, webpages, Interactive games, artifacts of movie etc. In the Imdb site 27000 people voted on the movie after just the first day. It became the first film to be ranked #1 on the site within two days of its theatrical release!!