We’ve been watching the hype surrounding the new Batman film with a great deal of interest and, as you can imagine, all the while we’ve been plotting our own launch campaign.
With something as large and widely anticipated as Batman it’s a safe bet to suggest that promotional activity should start a long way in advance in order to keep the anticipatory fires burning ever brighter (to speak rather prosaically). There’s absolutely nothing to be gained from sitting back and letting the excitement that surrounds a film like Batman carry the entire promotional effort – even if it is tempting to let the huge world fanbase already in existence do the work.
So, where would we start? How would we go about it all? And, most importantly, what would mark out our campaign from others?
Well, here at Hotcow, we’ve always been of the opinion that originality and relevance are of more importance than blanketing the entire country in promotional literature and run of the mill events.
Therefore, along with all the things you’d be expecting us to do if we were in charge of the campaign – making sure just about every kid in the UK had access to a promotional Batarang, plastering every spare space with coolly cryptic posters, offering incredible promotional prizes and so on, we’d also be doing this; hiring between 50 and 100 professional stuntmen.
Why would we be doing this? Well, mainly so that we could perpetrate a physical ad campaign and partially so that someone could drive the Batmobiles.
We’re not joking.
Batman is all about stealth, shadows and darkness and, as such, lends itself beautifully to a highly-organised whispering campaign. We would gather and equip stuntmen in all major cities and brief them to perch high above the city streets in various public and well-frequented (but shrouded in darkness) places.
Over the course of several days reports of strange bat-like figures seemingly watching over the streets below should start making it to the media. If this is done correctly (making sure the stuntmen are all of similar height and build and so on) and timed right, then it would appear that a single batman was making his way round the city in a death-defying manner exceedingly quickly. Naturally this would kick off a media frenzy…
Alongside this activity would be some motorised mayhem (we only said that because it alliterates well!), namely the use of a truck with a giant spotlight – complete with bat symbol – on the back. This truck (or one for every major city) would, in secret, appear on cloudy nights to beam the bat symbol onto the clouds for short periods. Then, to evade capture – and the resultant exposure of the scheme – it would rapidly depart and return to a secret location.
In tandem with this a number of replica Batmobiles would be spotted (only one at a time mind!) in the very darkest and quietest parts of the night – roaring from one place to another. Fragmented and disbelieving reports would filter to the media rapidly further increasing coverage.
This kind of campaign can only be carried out in extreme secrecy and relies upon continued mystery to keep fresh and keep going. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to pull off – but, if done well, causes a media storm and unparalleled public interest.
With this campaign only hints and suggestions are put in place – the imagination does the rest…and that’s a powerful tool. Once it gets going we just sit back, carry on and let an increasingly bewildered media do the rest!