How the dynamic duo of Ring and Batman went viral with a heroic doorbell campaign
March 01, 2023 | By Matt Miller, Sr. Copywriter
It’s nighttime. And everything is quiet. A little too quiet. An unsuspecting man steps up to a front door and casually rings the house’s Ring Video Doorbell. But, instead of the usual response from the homeowners, heroic music plays and a different voice responds from the Ring: “Bat Signal activated.”
He looks at the door, amazed. “The Batman?” he asks. “That’s pretty cool,” he says, before striking a superhero pose as the homeowner opens the door.
This is a real scene captured by Ring Video Doorbell showing the brand’s Batman-themed Quick Replies in action. In collaboration with Warner Bros.’ The Batman, the Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab worked with Ring to create a collection of pre-recorded responses that celebrate the Caped Crusader. This first-of-its-kind campaign from Ring ran from March 4 to March 21, timed to the release of the highly anticipated 2022 film The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz. And during that time, scenes like these of mild-mannered Ring users flooded social media to share reactions to the bat-messages.
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In the favorite user-created video of Ring head of brand marketing Lindsey Scheftic, a young man rings the doorbell and laughs with surprise when he hears the Quick Reply: “Bat Signal activated!”
“You just see his face light up,” Scheftic said. “The home security space is pretty serious, and for us it’s important when we can bring some fun to the brand.”
Scheftic even changed her own Ring Quick Reply to one that said: “Alfred has the day off today, and we’re down in the Batcave. Please leave a message with the doorbell.” It was a hit in her own family.
“My son, who is 4, loves Batman, and he rang our doorbell at least 50 times,” she said.
Ring’s Quick Replies are a feature that allow visitors to interact with the doorbell like a kind of answering machine for the door. In the past, the Quick Replies consisted of stock messages that Ring would update seasonally to include special messages for Halloween or other holidays. This marked the first time Ring partnered with a media property to create a custom Quick Reply.
“We knew that the Batman movie was going to be a big cultural moment, and we knew it would be something fun for our customers to participate in,” Scheftic said. “We had really high engagement for the content across all channels. And it’s about being able to show up in unexpected ways. We have a great brand, and it’s good for us to connect with other properties that will help us surprise and delight our customers.”
Ring and Batman saving the day
Across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, hundreds of thousands of social media users shared videos of the Batman Quick Reply in action. The campaign even garnered wider media attention, with outlets like Apartment Therapy, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and more enthusiastically covering the collaboration between Ring and The Batman. In total, Ring’s social media posts about the campaign drove 252.7K engagements and 628.8K views.1 The campaign was also supported by ad placements across IMDb, Streaming TV, and Fire TV media.
“It was really exciting,” Scheftic said. “This was a test for us, and we learned that it was really successful. Now we know that we can blow this out much bigger in the future.”
These kinds of innovative campaigns with Amazon Ads, Scheftic said, can help brands reach new audiences in creative and meaningful ways. “It was great,” she said. “We connected to something that was trending and it was cool to be part of a cultural moment. That was really important to us.”
And based on the success of the Batman campaign, Scheftic said Ring hopes to do more activations like this in the future.
Another job well done for the Dark Knight.
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1 Advertiser-provided data, 2022