The Dark Knight

Marketing campaign
Warner Bros. launched a campaign for The Dark knight in 2007 showing off the movies branding and nothing much else. However, not long after the sites launch the bat symbol that dominated most of the screen was created into a link to "I believe in Harvey Dent"  a site in which a man was campaigning for District Attorney, our first glimpse of Aaron Eckhart, the man who plays Harvey Dent.
  A few days after the first link was produced a second link was encrypted into joker cards that were found strewn over comic book stores which linked to a new site called "I believe in Harvey Dent Too!" a site in which Aaron Eckhart is show again, but this time the image is vandalised with horrific clown make-up.  This image was taken down after the site had enough subscribers for updates and the message "See you in December" was left.
  Distributed $1 bills directing people to WhySoSerious.com – a site that would become the hub of the online campaign and which is taken directly, we’d later see, from the movie itself. The bills were distributed at the San Diego Comic-Con in July of 2007, pretty much ensuring the participation of the legions of geeks in attendance there. The site told recipients to be at a certain place at a certain time and then sent them on a scavenger hunt of sorts, with those participating getting Joker masks and, once the clues had all been assembled, the site debuting the teaser trailer.
  WhySoSerious was briefly taken down, with the URL forwarding to Rent-A-Clown, which listed the
names of those that had participated in the San Diego game as employees.

  The ARG then entered a bit of a dark period between the end of July and the beginning of October, when WhySoSerious was relaunched, this time showing a pumpkin with a bat-shaped mouth, a direct homage to the Loeb/Lee Batman graphic novel, a book that prominently featured a pre-Two Face Harvey Dent. That focus on Two Face is important here since, over the course of October, half and only half the pumpkin would slowly rot, resulting in a disfigurement that immediately evoked the long-time Batman villain. The connection was only strengthened by the fact that, as was widely believed, something would happen on Halloween, when the candle would be burnt out completely and the rotting process complete.

That’s exactly what happened, too. On November 1st the site changed yet again, this time containing a hidden message that, once deciphered, led to RorysDeathKiss.

That site – whose name is notable since that’s the false name the movie was shot under while in Chicago – challenged people to gather in groups and take pictures of themselves in Joker-esque makeup in front of national monuments and other recognizable locations.

Those who did so – a process that involved offering a mailing address – later got physical copies of The Gotham Times while the rest of us got the paper’s website. In the paper were various stories of crimes committed, news on the mysterious Batman and other items of interest to the Gotham citizenry.

Not one to leave anything alone, though, the Joker created his own version called the TheHaHaHaTimes, featuring the same stories, though in this case versions that had been given a makeover by the lunatic.
It’s at this point that what had been a fun little diversion explodes into a fully realized alternate universe. Sites called WeAreTheAnswer, GothamPolice, GothamNationalBank, RememberingRegina, GothamCab, GothamCityRail, GVAFoundation, AcmeSecuritySystems, SaintSwithunsChurch and GothamUSD all pop up as a result of the stories in the paper. GothamCab’s site eventually then led to BettysHouseofPies.

WeAreTheAnswer, a site for community participation in fighting crime, eventually led to a new page on the GothamPolice site, and the BettysHouseofPies site led to GDPIAD, which featured an audio clip of two corrupt cops who had previously been mentioned in the Gotham Times being arrested. This side of the campaign would take a brief break, with the last thing offered being another audio clip, this time of one of a confession by one of the arrested officers.

All this while the Joker was leading people down a path from the Ha Ha Ha Times to Whysoserious.com/Personalityprofile, Whysoserious.com/mausoleum, Whysoserious.com/theperfectgetaway and eventually to Whysoserious.com/outoftime.and then Whysoserious.com/Steprightup.

It’s the last one that would have the most immediate pay-off since it contained instructions to pick up packages at 22 locations nationwide at a certain time on December 4th. Inside that package was a birthday cake with a cell phone baked into it.

There was also a new page branching off of the Step Right Up section of WhySoSerious, a section that featured a countdown clock to December 4th, that revealed the first teaser poster for the movie. At that time in the mainstream campaign, the first five minutes for the movie were being shown in front of IMAX prints of I Am Legend.

The release of the poster, and the end of this particular story arc in the campaign, came just a few days before Heath Ledger’s passing.

Whether motivated by his death of part of the plan all along – I tend to believe the latter simply because this had to have been designed ahead of time for it to be this well coordinated – the ARG then took a shift from pranks being committed by the joker and his band of ner-do-wells toward the campaign of crusading district attorney candidate Harvey Dent.

The IBelieveinHarveyDent site, the first of these micrositesdownloadable posters and campaign signs were added there, with his “supporters” being encouraged to then take a picture of themselves with the signage and then submit it to the site.

The campaign even came off the Internet in the form of the Dentmobile, a van that went around the country to various locations where the campaign had organized rallys. In some cases the rallies were met with less than enthusiasm by the actual police of some cities. Materials like Gotham City voter registration cards and other campaign materials were handed out and mailed to some of those who had registered on various sites so far, a new issue of the Gotham Times among the swag mailed. Of course the Joker responded with an updated version of the HaHaHaTimes, showing a consistency from the previous effort as well as signaling clearly that despite Ledger’s death, the character was living on in the campaign.

The battle for the District Attorney slot game heated as sites like one for Dana Worthington, another contender in the race, and one for incumbent DA Roger Garcetti popping up. At the same time supporters of justice in Gotham launched sites for the Maiden Avenue Report and the action group Citizens for Batman. Gotham Cable News also came on the online scene, profiling the candidates and providing more depth to our understanding of the political battles in the city.

Concerned Citizens for a Better Gotham, a front group for those solely interested in maintaining the corrupt status quo, sent out half-burned Dent campaign buttons at the end of March, just before players in the Joker-centric part of the game would get a message that, after visiting a page on Acme Security Systems’ site, would turn out to be from Lt. James Gordon informing them he knew who they were and they worked for him now. This came after those who had previously received Joker cell phones were told to go to various locations via the Clown Travel Agency, where they now received Joker-colored bowling balls and a new phone. It was on that phone that Gordon contacted them.

That coincided with the launch of the site for the Gotham Police Major Crimes Unit, a division headed by Gordon and committed to rooting out corrupt officials and tackling other, well, major crimes. More police officers would then be implicated in dirty dealings, with many of these cops and other officials trying to turn the debate against Dent and portray him as the crooked one, an assertion vehemently denied by ADA Rachel Dawes in a press conference that was distributed on the Maiden Avenue Report’s site.

Dent himself was then scheduled for a press conference but that had to be bumped when two of the cops accused of corruption tried to prove their innocence by taking hostages, a situation that Dent himself was able to negotiate an end to.

The investigation being run by Jim Gordon continued through text messages and more incriminating documents being added to various sites, culminating in Operation Slipknot, an effort to keep corrupt officials and cops from leaving the city. This involved having participants call the Intercontinental Hotel and having packages re-routed to them instead of their intended recipients. This led to the fall of Concerned Citizens for a Better Gotham, the sham advocacy group.

The Joker came back on the scene again by updating the It’s All Part of the Plan portion of WhySoSerious with information on coordinating local meetings at certain places. Upon meeting, the players were tasked first with finding numeric clues and then entering them on the site. That led to a carnival-esque duck shooting game at Sitting Ducks and then, after a countdown of a day or less, to a new Happy Trails page that contained the new theatrical trailer for the movie.

Harvey Dent’s campaign continued on through all of this, with his election soon being announced on the newly launched Gotham Cable News site, featuring the news program “Gotham Tonight.” The Gotham Times also made Dent’s win news and pointed to Gotham City Pizzeria’s site, a site that gave away a handful of free pizzas around the country. That pizza place’s site would later be hit by the Joker and point to WhySoSerious.com/MyHero, where people got their first glimpse of footage of Two-Face, footage that was shortly taken down.

The Joker then sent phone-owners a puzzle that leads to LaughTillItHurts page on WhySoSerious, a page that would eventually feature security camera footage of a Gotham bank.

Gordon’s Operation Slipknot would continue on, as would the Joker’s campaign of chaos, with the addition of a RedBalloons page, featuring another carnival midway-type game, to WhySoSerious. Gotham Cable News also continued adding Batman sightings and other news to its site. The Joker would take credit in a message sent to supporters that he was responsible for killing a mobster, a murder Gordon was investigating.

Eventually two more games were added to WhySoSerous, Operator (which involved all the cell phone owners) and PunkDrop. When the latter was completed a new poster was revealed.

Messages left on a variety of sites coupled with software keys that were decoded by participants led to the discovery of events being organized July 8th in Chicago and New York, an event that turned out to be the displaying of the Bat-symbol on the Sears Tower and Woolworth Building, respectively, events that were live-streamed on the web for those not able to make it.

WhySoSerious updated one more time with a new Overture page that counted down to 10PM on July 10th. At that time an email was sent to the Joker’s army that lead to a list of times and locations for free IMAX screenings of the movie, events that quickly sold out.

Just days before the movie, those with Joker phones got a call from a person supposedly being held hostage within Gotham National Bank, a call that ended with what appeared to be the Joker’s laugh before ending abruptly.

Just a couple of days before the end of the campaign all of ARG’s sites were defaced by the Joker, with the odd eyes and faces being pasted over all the pictures and his signature “hahahahaha” scrawled all over the screen, marking what appears to be his last laugh at the people of Gotham.

To sum up, here’s a list (as complete as I can make it) of all the sites that have been involved in this campaign’s storyline, in no particular order.

Made by: Warner Bros.
Made in: 2008.