Viral ad strategy

Warner Brothers used viral ad campaigns by promoting the film using the method of selling the game that relates to the film, creating a website that fans could find out info about the film on and merchandising to advertise.

"The campaign started with some teasers followed by campaign for the district attorney of Gotham City in which Harvey Dent was contesting.

The introduction of The Joker followed quickly, and from then on, the participants were engaged in games and scavenger hunts through clues and were also rewarded from time to time, not only materially, but also in the form of posters, teaser trailers, memorabilia, participation in the events related to the movie, and finally tickets to the movie. These activities helped in sustaining the interest of the audience in the movie and also in the ARG.

The ARG was highly successful and helped in establishing connection between the previous Batman movie, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The campaign ended from where the film took off. The success of any ARG is measured through user content and the Dark Knight ARG resulted in thousands of blog posts, Google searches, websites and participants. The success of ARG translated into the success of the film, and it went on to become one of the few films to gross over US$ 1 billion in box office collections."

The company set up a marketing campaign started by a fictional file being posted on The Dark Knight rises website with a warrant for the arrest of Batman, after taking the fall for Harvey Dent in the film. Also by creating a fake newspaper Gotham Times in order to sell the film, this was featured online. The website included this to gain fans and give the satisfaction to other fans of getting a sneak peak into the film. A sort of 'scavenger hunt' was used on the website, where pieces of documents were shown and fans had to find clues to where in America the film was set. Then graffiti of the Batman logo around America was placed so fans could take pictures near it bringing a sense of reality to the fictional film.

As well as posters, trailers, newspaper and the website, merchandise was used to advertise the film as fast food restaurants e.g. burger king created a meal named The dark whopper and included a free Batman toy, making kids everywhere happy and ready for the film to come out. A lot of films use merchandise as a marketing strategy as Mcdonalds are known for selling happy meals with toys from film such as Toy Story.