When I heard the news that Heath Ledger was found dead yesterday, I couldn’t help being a little skeptical. Not to be disrespectful of the dead, but I thought in the first minutes of the reports that it might all be a clever ruse by a very risky marketing team.

Let me take you back in my experience leading up to his death.

I had been researching the viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight in preparation of doing a post about the numerous things they were doing right to get fans involved. Not having even participated in any of the ARG–or alternate reality game–action, I was still excited to read about all of the various games put together for fans of the movie.

The campaign is being done by famed 42 Entertainment, known for the Halo 2 ARG ILoveBees. It has created a deep reality spanning both the Web and real world for the fans. You can read all about the various elements of the viral marketing efforts in the “Marketing” section of the Wikipedia entry for The Dark Knight.

Recently, clues from the viral marketing campaign led fans to various bakeries in cities around the country where they received cakes containing hidden evidence bags with a real cell phone inside. After following the given instructions and calling a phone number from the cake, fans were left waiting for the Joker to call.

The second factor in my skepticism came from a podcast by Revision3 called The Totally Rad Show. In a recent episode, co-host Alex Albrecht mentioned how he felt Christopher Nolan was really taking up the idea that the Joker was “undead” since he is killed before coming back to life as one of Batman’s greatest villains. Many reports online were citing the many surprises awaiting moviegoers in Nolan’s imagining of the Joker.

Now that we are up to speed, enter the news of Heath Ledger dying just weeks later. The idea crept into my head that this news might be part of the campaign as well.

Obviously, this theory was blown out of the water after numerous official, confirmed reports of Ledger’s body being found and the reactions of his family. For those few minutes before more information was known, I theorized that 42 Entertainment might have blown the ARG open.

Can you imagine how insane that level of depth and immersion would have been? People were rushing to CNN.com to see the breaking news headline that Heath Ledger was found unresponsive and possibly dead. In that moment, what if, as the Joker himself says, “It’s all part of the plan.”

Of course, they would have had to retract the staged death quickly and made sure that the correct information was known. It would have been controversial.

If Ledger had prepped his family and close friends for the news and the ARG team was ready to go with the next stage–a Joker call from the beyond perhaps–that would have been an epic ARG event. If they had staged the faking of his death in a few months, just before the movie’s release, the stunt might have made a huge impact with fans and the mainstream public as well without breaking fans out of the ARG state of mind.

Despite how impossible it seems, part of me almost wishes that this theory was the truth. We wouldn’t have lost a talented actor so young in his career, and the move would have completely blown any ARG to date out of the water by bringing participants down to reality with the idea of death before pulling them deeper back to the game with the reveal.

What a great way to re-introduce the character of the Joker for longtime fans looking for new life in the Batman saga. It would have been interesting.

I haven’t played around with Facebook pages just yet. Basically, they provide a free profile/page for any company/brand that wants one. In putting up Facebook ads, I have noticed the Facebook boys and girls are pushing hard to have advertisers all make one. One fellow blogger over at Leveraging Ideas recently posted a possibly business to be made in creating pages for big brands before they get to them.

However, ANYONE can sign up a Page for brand or company if that name is not already claimed. This is exactly what I have been doing. So far I have registered Harvard University, 24 and the Sopranos (TV shows), Kleiner Perkins, Patagonia, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, Blackberry and others.

In his theory, if you register a page for a specific brand or company, you could operate this page in hopes that said company would contact you and possibly nicely ask you for control of the page with a fat check–sort of the way that domain owners go about hunting down hot domains before companies register them.

I’d encourage people to sign-up their favorite brands. Apparently that is what Facebook wanted since they currently have no authentication system. The best-case scenario is you get paid off. The worst case is you become a temporary marketing company working with the best brands worldwide.

Facebook couldn’t possibly have built this big of a flaw into the page system. One commenter on the post already posted that, unlike domain names, the Facebook pages aren’t unique.

However, there can be any number of Facebook pages that have the name Kleiner Perkins, such like there can be any number of people named Carl Perkins. It is up to the user to sort out which is the “real” Kleiner Perkins or Carl Perkins among all the others.

If that is the case, it seems to defeat the purpose of the pages in my mind–one location for fans of the company to unite and connect with the messages from that brand. A single page would give control to the company and give them an official presence on Facebook. If there are multiple instances, it will just turn into a big mess like all those groups were with “The Official [Brand] Fan Group.” Is Facebook not requiring authentication because they want to demand that businesses sponsor a page and pay in order to make it official? I don’t want to mess with joining three groups to champion brands I am not fully connected with like my cell phone or favorite podcast.

If Facebook doesn’t already have some authentication method in place, it is in their best interest to get one. Otherwise, I don’t see these pages becoming useful. Messages and cool company pages will only get muddled in a sea of fanboys and spammers.

This space will not become the next big domain mogul gold mine either because it is proprietary, and Facebook has shown that they are too smart to let that happen. Unlike the domain space, Facebook is in control all the pages and registers all of them. They want advertisers to create them so that they can take advantage of Facebook’s ad system and features. If some big corporation wanted to create a Facebook page, and a lone individual already owned and operated that page for them, Facebook would intervene to settle the problem for their advertiser.

If pages are this messy, I’ll just wait until Facebook starts the Facebook News Network so I can sponsor this program. (below)

Also via Leveraging Ideas

Update 1: Facebook contacted Leveraging Ideas with a confusing generic message that a page the blogger created was being taken down. The reasons stated for the removal don’t seem to fit though.

Update 2: Despite the lack of explanation, it seems Facebook deleted one of the pages he created and may do the same in the future, but his 24 and Ralph Lauren pages are still going strong.