It’s a banner week for viral marketing campaigns. Following the release of the Jaws 19 trailer to celebrate the 30 Anniversary of Back To The Future, Warner Bros. has unveiled a viral marketing campaign of their own to promote the upcoming release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Their latest push takes the form of an exclusive interview between Fortune Magazine and Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). Based on what we saw in the last trailer, Eisenberg won’t be anything like the quiet Mark Zuckerberg we saw in The Social Network, instead he looks to be more ruthless and cunning, but still having that cool-guy vibe. If anything the latest profile piece will give us some insight as to what kind of Lex Luthor we will see in the film. Check it out below.
Fortune describes Luthor as a “31-year-old wunderkind” and a “jeans-wearing genius” with a workplace that has an organizational culture that mirrors Google and Facebook. According to the site it has climbing wall in his employee “inspiration station” and coding in “the crucible,” the “cutting-edge R & D lab where the baby-faced billionaire verbally extemporizes computer code like Miles Davis improvising a trumpet solo.”
Luthor talks about his emotional backstory and the legacy of his father while he and the interviewer wait at LexCorp’s vegan food truck:
“Dad named the company after himself ten years before I made my unexpected entrance into his life. But investors seemed to respond to the idea of an adoring father building a legacy for his precious son. He used that to his advantage. It was a good shtick and, whatever else he was, he was a good businessman.”
In the piece, it is revealed that Lex’s father is an East German émigré who arrived in America with nothing, “but managed to carve out an empire of oil and machinery,” through sheer grit and will. During his meteoric rise to power, he has made a lot of enemies, but Lex doesn’t necessarily see his father’s tenacity as something that would make enemies:
“Well, Dad was a complicated guy. He came from a country where the government, in the guise of protector, had absolute control over the citizens. That drove him. I get it. Heck, I’d hate to see that sort of thing happen over here.”
The article then gets into comparing LexCorp with Wayne Enterprises. According to Fortune, LexCorp has quickly become the second largest emerging technology corporation in the world next to Wayne Enterprises. Unlike Wayne, LexCorp got to where they are by taking bigger risks, and going to places where Wayne fears to tread:
“It’s a necessity. We live in the most dangerous point of time in all of human history. Statistically speaking, it’s a near certainty that another world-changing crisis is hurtling toward us like a speeding bullet. We have to be ready to defend ourselves. No civilization was ever conquered by having a strong military.”
Much more of the feature on Luthor can be read over at Fortune.
It should be interesting to see how far the viral marketing campaign will go from here. Because of how social media grants us access to information instantly, a lot of how viral marketing campaigns works have changed since The Dark Knight, which is probably why you don’t see as many scavenger hunts as before. But to add to the viral marketing fun, WB has set up a Lex Luthor Twitter account.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice opens in theaters March 25th, 2016.
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