Movie studio marketing fascinates me as it’s more of an art than a science.  Advertising executives that do most of the media buying to get The Dark Knight in the minds of consumers don’t exactly know how to best spend their advertising dollars.  Additionally, there are cross promotional and licensing agreements that make movie studio marketing quite interesting.  Below is a screen shot from Yahoo! Games:

The image above is a Dark Knight website skin that appears on Yahoo to promote the new Verizon Wireless Dark Knight limited edition cell phone.  So this means that Verizon and the movie studio that produced The Dark Knight made an agreement to license out the Batman brand.  They stuck the Batman brand on this mediocre looking cell phone and struck an advertising deal with Yahoo to sell it.  The Yahoo games section probably gets a few million unique hits a day, but will this result in people rushing out to purchase this cell phone and subscribe with Verizon?  I don’t know - and that’s what makes movie studio marketing so difficult and interesting at the same time.