Battery's Be the Batman campaign for Batman Arkham Knight launched in the United States in June 2015, winning Silver at Ad Age's Small Agency Awards and
How Battery's Be the Batman Campaign Redefined Gaming Advertising
Be the Batman is a June 2015 integrated advertising campaign created by Los Angeles agency Battery for Warner Bros. and the Batman franchise, promoting the video game Batman Arkham Knight in the United States across digital, live-action, outdoor, and platform placements by positioning Batman as a flawed but aspirational human figure rather than an unattainable superhero.
The campaign launched at a pivotal moment in the North American gaming calendar, arriving ahead of Batman Arkham Knight's wide retail release and tasked with converting both lapsed franchise fans and new console owners into day-one buyers. Battery's strategic brief was to move beyond the conventional gameplay-trailer format that dominated video-game advertising in the United States and instead offer audiences an emotional proposition rooted in identity: not what Batman can do, but who Batman chooses to be. That reframing sits at the heart of every execution the campaign produced.
Battery held only three employees at the time of the campaign's creation, according to Ad Age, making the ambition of the brief extraordinary relative to the agency's size. The account was also Battery's first assignment from Warner Bros., as confirmed by the agency's Chief Creative Officer Philip Khosid in reporting by Ad Age, meaning the studio's confidence rested entirely on the strength of a concept, not a prior relationship. In the United States, where Batman Arkham Knight competed in a crowded summer release window against established gaming franchises, that creative bet proved consequential.
Clapboard Score: 56/100. The campaign earns marks for strategic clarity and measurable commercial impact, with score points tempered by the limited volume of publicly archived creative assets and the relatively narrow digital footprint of its documented executions.
Battery built Be the Batman on a single consumer insight. Batman occupies a unique position among superheroes in the United States because he possesses no supernatural powers, only will, discipline, and the decision to act. That distinction, commonplace in comic fandom, had rarely been used as the central axis of a commercial campaign, and Battery recognised it as the lever most likely to create genuine emotional investment among adult gaming audiences rather than spectacle-seeking younger demographics.
The strategic rationale aligned with broader market conditions in the United States. According to iSpot.tv data reported by Ad Age, US national television spending by video-game brands reached a substantial sum in 2015, with sixty-five video-game brands airing more than 250,000 spots across the year, making differentiation through tone and narrative rather than media weight the only viable path for a challenger agency. In that environment, an aspirational human proposition cut differently from the action-saturation strategy deployed by larger competitors such as Activision, whose franchises dominated share-of-voice in the category. Electronic Arts similarly relied on spectacle-driven creative for its sports and shooter titles, reinforcing the convention Battery chose to subvert.
The global digital-games market reached a substantial scale in 2015, according to reporting by GamesBeat, with the broader games software and dedicated hardware segment estimated at an even larger figure by GameIndustry.biz, underscoring the commercial stakes attached to a flagship franchise launch. In the United States specifically, Batman Arkham Knight entered a PlayStation 4 platform ecosystem that Sony was actively trying to build, giving the campaign a secondary objective beyond game sales: driving console hardware attachment. That dual mandate shaped Battery's media placement choices and the platforms on which the campaign concentrated its weight.
Battery's creative execution for Be the Batman combined live-action film production with gameplay trailers and outdoor placements to construct a unified tonal argument across every surface the campaign touched in the United States. The campaign comprised one documented primary media asset alongside broader integrated placements, with the creative direction maintained by Battery's Raymond Hwang and Bernie O'Dowd under the oversight of Chief Creative Officer Philip Khosid, as identified in Ad Age's awards coverage.
The live-action component leaned into the psychological weight of the Batman mythology rather than its action mechanics. By foregrounding the character's humanity and the deliberate choice that underpins every act of heroism, the execution avoided the visual grammar of a standard video-game commercial and instead borrowed register from prestige brand advertising. That tonal positioning was deliberate: Battery's CEO Anson Sowby and the creative leadership understood that an audience of adult console owners in the United States responds to emotional sincerity in ways that pure spectacle cannot replicate, particularly when the product being sold is an interactive experience where the player themselves assumes the character's identity.
The campaign's digital placements worked in concert with its platform-specific positioning, with distribution shaped around the PlayStation ecosystem to support Sony's parallel hardware sales objectives. Outdoor executions extended the campaign's physical presence in key US markets, translating the aspirational human proposition into large-format imagery that functioned independently of gameplay footage. The integration across live-action film, digital, and outdoor — achieved by an agency of three people — represents the production accomplishment that most distinguishes Be the Batman from comparable gaming campaigns of its era, and the element that Ad Age's Small Agency Awards judges cited in conferring Silver recognition in the Integrated Campaign category in 2016.
Batman Arkham Knight broke the franchise's first-week sales record following the campaign's launch in June 2015, according to Ad Age. That outcome confirmed that Be the Batman succeeded in its primary commercial objective of converting marketing investment into measurable purchase behaviour in the United States at launch.
The impact extended beyond game sales. Sony credited Be the Batman as the biggest driver of PlayStation console sales during the relevant quarter, according to Ad Age, a significant secondary result given that hardware attachment was a stated objective of the campaign's platform strategy. For a campaign produced by a three-person agency, generating both software and hardware movement at scale represents an unusual degree of commercial leverage.
Batman Arkham Knight was the number-one selling title in the United States during its launch period, as reported by Ad Age, confirming market leadership in the most competitive gaming territory in the world at the time. The campaign subsequently received a Silver Award for Small Agency Campaign of the Year in the Integrated category at Ad Age's Small Agency Conference and Awards in 2016, as reported by Ad Age, providing external industry validation for the creative and strategic approach.
Battery itself grew from three employees to seventeen full-time staffers by 2016, according to Ad Age, a growth trajectory directly attributable to the agency's elevated profile following Be the Batman. No additional verified third-party performance metrics for the campaign are publicly available beyond those attributed to Ad Age's coverage, but the convergence of franchise sales records, hardware impact acknowledged by Sony, and market leadership in the United States constitutes one of the stronger documented performance profiles in gaming advertising from 2015.
Be the Batman was an integrated advertising campaign created by Battery for Warner Bros. and the Batman franchise in June 2015 in the United States. It promoted Batman Arkham Knight by positioning Batman as a flawed but aspirational human figure, running across digital, live-action, outdoor, and platform placements to drive both game sales and PlayStation console attachment.
Battery, a Los Angeles agency, created Be the Batman. According to Ad Age, Battery had only three employees at the time of the campaign's creation. It was also the agency's first assignment from Warner Bros. Battery subsequently grew to seventeen full-time staffers by 2016, according to Ad Age, following the campaign's commercial success.
Be the Batman won a Silver Award in the Small Agency Campaign of the Year — Integrated category at Ad Age's Small Agency Conference and Awards in 2016, as reported by Ad Age. The recognition reflected both the campaign's creative ambition and its demonstrable commercial results in the United States gaming market during the Batman Arkham Knight launch period.
Batman Arkham Knight broke the franchise's first-week sales record following the campaign's June 2015 launch, according to Ad Age. The title became the number-one selling game in the United States during its launch period. Sony also credited Be the Batman as the biggest driver of PlayStation console sales during the relevant quarter, per Ad Age reporting.
Key Battery personnel on Be the Batman included Philip Khosid as Chief Creative Officer, Anson Sowby as CEO, Raymond Hwang and Bernie O'Dowd as Creative Directors, and Judy Gotten, as identified in Ad Age's awards coverage. The entire campaign was developed and produced when the agency comprised only three full-time employees, according to Ad Age.
Battery identified that Batman's lack of supernatural powers made him uniquely relatable among superhero properties in the United States. The agency used that distinction to build an aspirational identity proposition for adult gaming audiences, differentiating Be the Batman from the spectacle-driven creative conventions dominant among competitors such as Activision and Electronic Arts in 2015.
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