THE DARK KNIGHT RISES I
Abstract
This case study takes an in-depth look into the The Dark Knight Rises social media campaign. It analyses the way in which Warner Brothers Entertainment marketed the movie through various social media outlets, Twitter in particular, and looks at the way this social media campaign created a sense of community and elicited excitement and anticipation for the films release. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and growth of the campaign and assess its success. Through research, Jono Bacon’ s buzz cycle was examined in regards to the campaign and the stages it went through from creation to implementation.
In order to evaluate this social media campaign and its significance in creating and sustaining fan communities, a discourse analysis was conducted where multiple hashtags were looked at regarding the campaign and themes were extracted to analyze the fans’ responses to the film. In order to properly assess the campaign, the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting on the films opening night and the reactions and effect that this event had on the film and campaign’ s success were examined alongside the campaign structure. As a result, themes that were discovered included anticipation, opinions and excitement, among others. Even with the tragedy of the theater shooting, due to Warner Bros’ campaign, the press generated by the shooting and the sense of community that it created, the shooting had minimal effect on the overall success of the campaign and the revenue made by the movie.
Through this case study, the two main theories examined were Elihu Katz’ s Uses and Gratifications theory and the public relations drip-drip-drip technique. By looking at these two techniques, insights into the campaign’ s overall creation and strategy were gained and it was concluded that this viral social media campaign was successful in creating and sustaining the films fan community, even in the wake of tragedy.
The Researchers
Alexa was an excellent notetaker because she extracted ideas from the group discussion and organized them practically. She conducted extensive background research on the timeline of events, one of the hashtags and also co-wrote the literature review and organized the final report with Ariel. Alexa also contributed to the final writings of the results, where she linked the theories and the collected Twitter information. She also wrote the conclusion and future research component of the final paper. Also, Alexa contributed to the editing process throughout the assignment.
Ariel co-wrote the literature review and organized the final report with Alexa. She identified and applied theories in the project, edited all of the in-text citations, the literature review and the final report. She also created the bibliography for the literature review and final report, and constructed a database to keep track of citations and events on the timeline. Ariel created the infographic, the title page, biographies with images and the appendix. Ariel co-wrote the revised research questions and methods with Nikita.