Harvey Dent For District Attorney!

Can we stop for a minute to admire the beautiful work being done for The Dark Knight marketing campaign? After the untimely death of Heath Ledger, who plays The Joker in the upcoming film, I thought the marketing would be doomed. Up until that point, the marketing team had focused their efforts on Ledger and his sickly deranged Joker character. After his passing, The Dark Knight marketing team (42 Entertainment) switched their focus to the film's other villain, politician Harvey Dent - played by Aaron Eckhart (Thank You For Smoking). There's so much to talk about in regards to this campaign, it's multi-layered and extremely complex. But for the sake of this blog post, I'll be focusing on the efforts surrounding Dent, and his role in the film.

42 Entertainment has run a faux grassroots political campaign for Harvey Dent, without any association to the new Batman pic - other then the fact that Dent runs for District Attorney of Gotham City. The campaign for Dent actually started about a year ago when posters like the one below were plastered all over cities nationwide.



According to The Chicago Tribune, exactly 72 hours after the posters were put up, they were all defaced in exactly the same manner to wind up looking like this:



Supporters of Harvey Dent can point their browsers to ibelieveinharveydent.com, done up to look exactly like a website for a politician. There, you can check out videos and photos in support of Dent - think Youtube and Obama. There is also a section about the Dentmobile - a nationwide campaign that stops in cities recruiting help to "clean up Gotham City".

42 Entertainment has even gone so far as to create controversy between Dent, a rival politician, and a dissenting political group. There's a site for The Gotham Times, and a hijacked version called The HaHaHa Times. (Thanks to movie marketing madness for the info.)

I could keep talking about all the websites and minute details associated with the brilliant viral campaign, but I think it's best to let you explore. If I'm leaving anything major out, post a comment and I'll include it in a follow-up post. Go Dent!