More Dark Knight updates

Another part of Gotham City has gotten its own official website courtesy of Warner Bros. and their continuing Dark Knight online campaign. This time it’s Gotham City Rail, with has a full route map of the city and the stops on each line. Included on the map are the sections of the system that were taken out in Batman Begins as Batman killed Ras Al Ghul, which is a very cool touch.

C2B reports on some of the replies people have gotten after sending “tips” to the WeAreTheAnswer.org site, something supposedly set up by Harvey Dent to root out corruption on the Gotham police force.

EmpireOnline is getting in on the fun, with a HeIsComing section of their site that is peeling away playing cards to, it’s assumed, eventually reveal our first good, full look at The Joker himself.

Finally, Craig chimes in on the online campaign to date. After agreeing with my opinion that this is a great campaign he makes the following points:

Do you really think that anyone in the mainstream media is watching this? Is there going to be a single person who buys a ticket to see The Dark Knight this summer, that wouldn’t have done so if it weren’t for this campaign? Furthermore, this is freakin’ Batman! Is there a single person covering this stuff among online movie sites that wasn’t going to see this movie anyway? Shouldn’t this effort go towards a franchise or property that doesn’t have the name recognition that Batman already has?

… is it worth it in the end? Will this movie make any more money with this campaign than it would have without it? This campaign had to be somewhat expensive to produce, but where is the ROI? How is Warner Bros. going to measure whether this campaign was successful or not in the end?

All completely valid questions. Let me offer my two turtledoves (since it’s Christmas and all):

Is the mainstream media watching this? No, because it’s happening online and the only way they’d write about it is if someone sent them a press release or gave them an exclusive. (Hope they’re all this simple to answer.)
Will this campaign draw anyone new to the movie? Maybe, maybe not. But you know what it will do? Strengthen the intent of those people already predisposed to see the movie. It’s going to do that by showing them the first movie was not a fluke, that this is a franchise with deep continuity. It will help insure people show up and that the movie doesn’t get relegated to the “Ugh, just don’t have time for it now” list.
Shouldn’t this money go toward other movies with less built in name recognition? Absolutely, but until the entire business model of Hollywood is upended that’s not going to happen. It sucks, but there it is.
Where is the ROI? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…oh, sorry. I meaBWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No seriously. ROI onlinBWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
How is WB going to measure success? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, that was left over from #4. If I were running this I would be using the number of blog mentions times some sort of imaginary number like engagement or something. Ad equivalence doesn’t work online and not everyone makes their traffic stats publicly available. Hopefully WB figured out how they’re going to determine success BEFORE launching this campaign. Hopefully.

The key to all this is whether indeed Warner Bros. set up goal posts before diving in. As long as they did that then they’ll be fine. Right now online is severely lacking in hard and fast metrics, so it’s up to the team themselves to determine what success looks like. Sometimes that’s a more concrete thing than other times.

Right now I’m happy as a fan of the franchise as well as a fan of innovative marketing with this campaign. It’s increased my desire to see the movie, moving it from a “Yeah I’ll see it” to a “ZOMG I can’t wait until this movie comes out” in my book.

More than that, it’s been the first comic adaptation I can think of that so effectively has been engaging to the core comics audience. With the Comic-Con stuff, the street hunts and everything else, this has gone right after the people who will make or break this movie before engaging in a mass-audience reach push.