In today’s class we looked at the advertising campaign for Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight”.

The strategy was compelling in itself – it was extremely interactive, inviting the audience to become a part of the game, or story, which it created. From a marketing point of view I think it was very smart and very successful.

From a story point of view, I was struck by the absence of the iconic character Batman from the entire campaign. The film is of course a ‘Batman film’, however the advertising strategy focused solely on The Joker and Harvey Dent. From the brief research I did, I deduced that Batman was almost entirely absent from the campaign.

I wonder why that is. Is it an attempt to create a story outside of the Batman world so that the advertising campaign lends itself the the real world more realistically? Is it supposed to keep one of the characters shrouded in mystery in the lead up to the premiere of the film? Is it simply because Christian Bale wasn’t available to take part in the campaign?

Whatever the reason, I’ll probably never know, it emphasised to me the importance of character in creating story, narrative and plot. This campaign plucked two characters from “The Dark Knight” and used them to create an entire interactive story set in the real world. They created the basis for the story, from which everything else was built. And it didn’t matter that neither character was the ‘main’ one.