The Village Bicycle

Enough with the bat-motorcycle already! Warner Brothers has both the perfect ad campaign and worst ad campaign for this summer’s blockbuster and continuation of the never ending Batman series, The Dark Knight.

The best: Images of Heath Ledger as a sad zombie.

This ad a tasteful way capitalize on Ledger’s passing and with classic imagery of the “sad clown”. I can look at these ads on a bus passing, on the BART, on a billboard, and know exactly what’s going on and want to see this tragic academy award winner’s last and darkest role.

The worst: The damn bat-motorcycle images.

What the heck am I looking at and why do I care? The photo above is actually one of the better bat-motorcycle ads where you can actually make out that it’s a vehicle of some sort. Couldn’t they have stuck with the ever-familiar and always decked out Bat-mobile? The Bat-motorcycle has a goofy shape, which I’m sure will look good in the movie, but doesn’t translate at all into an ad. It takes the viewer a while to make out what the image is of (the color scheme is completely dark with a little fire in the bottom corner - a useless accent, since the fire doesn’t have anything to do with what’s making the viewer care about this movie, and the unrecognizable shape of the vehicle make this ad impossible), and once the viewer figures it out, there isn’t anything in the ad to show why the viewer should care. What WB is trying to do, I’m presuming, is to tap into the demographic of people who care about the techi-gadgets of Batman’s arsenal, which they should have done with better artwork in a different medium. scenes of a chases on youtube would have been great.

The Decent: The burning building behind batman.

This ad doesn’t quite match up to the effectiveness of the Ledger ads, but it is dramatic and easy to read. Slightly overdone in a pre9-11 era and not nearly as embracing as the Cloverfield adsfrom December, but still, solid imagry thatcoveys the darkness of the filmand demand for a summer hero.
Overall, I think WB should havehired the guy that made all the ads for Spiderman 3.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS