MCF's links this past Monday mentioned a new viral campaign for the upcoming sequel to Batman Begins, called The Dark Knight.

Here's a brief summary: If you visit the website I Believe In Harvey Dent, you see a campaign poster for Harvey Dent, as portrayed by Aaron Eckhart in the upcoming film. (Batman fans know that Harvey Dent is the District Attorney in Gotham and that he eventually becomes the villain Two Face).

OK, that's fun enough on it's own ... but it turned out that if you also visited the website I Believe In Harvey Dent Too, you'd see a hacked and defaced version of Dent's campaign site, and you'd have the opportunity to enter your e-mail address and participate in the hacking of the site.

Once the site was completely hacked, the Dent campaign poster was slowly dissolved to reveal the first official picture of Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight. It's a darker, scarier version of the Joker than we've seen on the screen (or in the comics), featuring a "smile" that's a scarred version of the "permagrin" and a haphazard, sloppy version of the Joker's face paint:

Neat, huh? But it gets better. After a couple of days, the image of the Joker was taken down and replaced with a simple page not found message. Except things aren't as they appear. Now, if you visit I Believe In Harvey Dent Too and highlight the whole page with your mouse, you see a ramshackle series of Joker style laughs, something that'll look familiar to Batman comics fans everywhere:

Oh, and it gets even better. Some fanboy with more patience than this fanboy poured over the page and noticed a series of characters that don't belong in an otherwise simple series of ha ha ha's. These characters, when strung together, spell out the phrase See you in December.

There's been speculation that this is an indication that we'll see the first official Dark Knight trailer in December (the movie itself is about fourteen months away). Somebody even checked and found out that the url SeeYouInDecember.com has already been registered by the same company that put together the I Believe In Harvey Dent net campaign for Warner Brothers.

So what have I found out by personally exploring?

Well, the website December.com has long been familiar to me, since it's a resource for all kinds of stuff, including HTML coding, and I use it to get hex code for colors.

What I didn't see until today, though, is that on the front page, the word December is misspelled Decembur. So what do you see in the u in December? Well, if you click on the u, you get an eight second video of...

Just kidding. I made all that up. Except the part about December.com being a great resource for HTML code and stuff. I really have used it for ages.

Meantime, I'm eating up this viral marketing thing. The industrial metal band Nine Inch Nails did a great viral marketing campaign for their most recent album, and I enjoyed it. The viral marketing for Batman Begins is probably going to be even more fun. I've been wondering why nobody as yet had attempted to really cash in on potential generated by the internet success of the Blair Witch Project.

This kind of thing makes anticipating the movie as much fun as watching the film(maybe more fun than watching it ... see Spider-Man 3, for example.) According to IMDb, there are even official Dark Knight posters out already. That's one to the right. Wheeeeeee!

Labels: Entertainment