Chrysler just won’t end its association with a dark and brooding urban presence. But now that presence is Batman, not Detroit.For the July 20 release of The Dark Knight Rises, the final piece of the Warner Bros. “prequel” trilogy about the rise of Batman, Chrysler has launched an “Imported from Gotham City” campaign that kicked off with a contest that allows fans to help create an original co-branded TV spot featuring the Chrysler 300 and Batman.
On Tuesday the campaign continued with the first airing, on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, of a 3o-second co-branded spot by the automaker and the studio that depicts a “transformation” of a Chrysler 300S into a custom-designed Chrysler 300 “Dark Knight Rises” edition.“The TV spot was designed and shot to look and feel as if it could live inside the Gotham City itself,” Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois noted in his blog.
Affiliating with The Dark Knight Rises is an interesting strategy for the Chrysler brand. It has been veering away from its original, Eminem-based “Imported from Detroit” positioning since it ran the thematically associated but polemically challenged Clint Eastwood spot during the last Super Bowl in February. The most recent significant ads from Chrysler are a suite of four TV spots that the company hatched several weeks ago, one for each of its brands, and none of them relies on being set in the Motor City.
