3 posts tagged “lost”

    The third phase of the lost experience reality game ended Friday, September 8th.  More than a month of searching for video fragments has left us with this final video.  Phase IV started several weeks ago with Apollo Candy and the  Where is Alvar? site.  It is amazing that this marketing campaign has gone to the lengths it has to become reality.  Glyph hunts and candy bar give aways- who would have thought.  We'll see if this revolutionary marketing campaign pays off when the Lost season premieres October 4th on abc.

    If you are new to the game or would like to know more please visit The Lost Experience Clues.  These guys do a great job with the game!

    Televison networks are continuing to struggle through the dry summer months.  Last week Entertainment Weekly reported that only one television program, CSI Miami, had over 10 million viewers.   It is expected that the summer season attract fewer viewers, but are we witnessing a greater phenomenon?  It appears that people, especially today’s youth, are looking elsewhere for their viewing needs. YouTube announced  that they are delivering more than one hundred million videos per day.  My Space accounts for almost 20% of the remaining video downloads with AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo accounting for another 5%. 

It appears as though things may be drastically changing.  Several years of declining box office revenues paint a similar picture.  With the advent and growing popularity of DVR technology, television advertising seems to be less than effective. I recently blogged about the revolutionary marketing and advertising currently underway by means of the Lost Experience Game.  Its seems as though NBC has also taken to the internet to advocate their hit show The Office. 

NBC is in the process of airing a mini-series of webisodes starring the accountants of Dunder Mifflen.  The plot revolves around $3000.00 that seems to be missing from the Scranton branch.  Jan (from corporate) has instructed the accountants (Angela, Oscar, and Kevin) to find the culprit.  Each week a new webisode is released (on Thursday) and a different office member is interrogated. Just like the lost experience game, this is a great tie over for fans of The Office.  It keeps them involved until the new season begins.

It seems obvious that things are changing.  It is very easy to watch hours pass by while you click away on your computer.  So, it only makes sense that network television is exploring the internet as an avenue for advertising and marketing their products (some of which now, are web-based products). 

Television advertising obviously needs to be revamped.  It is going to take more than an ABC executive asking cable companies to disable the fast-forward button on their DVR units to get advertising heading into the right direction.  Mike Shaw, abc's president of sales and marketing, was incorrect when he stated that people only use DVRs for the recording capability, and not fro the fast forward feature.  The only reason I started watching TV again is because I could fast forward through commercials and because I can watch the shows I want to watch on my own time table.  Without DVRs I would just use netflix and watch the show on DVD. No cable company is going to disable the fast-forward button, because if they did, everybody would buy a TiVo. 

Internet advertising campaigns afford advertisers the opportunity to promote their products in a revolutionary fashion.  Whether this is advertising of the future is yet to be determined but it certainly allows advertisers to explore new avenues.  It seems apparent that TV commercials are inefficient.  Content needs to be more entertaining, shorter, and more specific to hold a viewer’s attention.  The answer may lay in product placement. Regardless, advertisers need to develop new clever ways of marketing their product.

Ultimately, I think the lost experience game and the office webisodes are great.  I enjoy them as a consumer.  They are a great way to promote their respective TV programs and networks.  I can say that I  remember the name of each company that has advertisements associated with the lost experience game or the webisodes.  Anybody involved with the lost experience game know that Verizon, Sprite, Jeep, and Monster.com have been intimately involved.  Clues to the game have been embedded in their wesites.  Clearly, these advertisements are more effective than any television advertisement, and are probably much less expensive.  Things are surely changing, it's only a matter of time until we see what change produces.

Conventional media has been flailing the past couple of years.  The last two weeks of record low TV ratings and several years of mediocre box office succes clearly show that there is another phenomenon captivating our empty minutes of the evening. For the last 11 weeks abc has been implementing an avenue of  revolutionary marketing  for their hit show Lost.  The reality game seeks to find the answer to the question "WHERE IS ALVAR HANSO" of the Hanso Foundation, a fictitious organization  in Lost. Near the end of the second season abc began preparing for the game by placing advertisements for the Hanso foundation during Lost.  They also published press releases from the Hanso Foundation and conducted an interview with Hugh McIntyre on Jimmy Kimmel Live.  Entertainment weekly later announced that there was to be a  3 phase game that would play out over the summer (abc just announced today that the game will have 5 phases).  This is a great thing for curious Lost fans who cannot wait to find out more about the mysteries of "The Island" and may revolutionize the failing business model of network telelvision.

The first phase of the game took place across a number of websites on the web primarily the hanso foundation.org.  Every few days a new hack would appear on the website revealing a clue.  The hacker, who later revealed herself as Persophone, slowly released clues regarding the malicious acts of the Hanso Foundation.  More and more information was released until the Hanso Foundation shut down their website citing the malicious infiltration as the reason.  This concluded the first phase.

The second phase started when the address to Rachel Blake's blog was found in the source code for The Hanso Foundation's website.  Rachel is trying the expose the Hanso Foundation for the evil organization that it is.  She went to Europe to investigate the foundation first hand.  She posted regularly the things that she had discovered as she followed Middelwerk (the CEO of the Hanso Foundation) from Copenhagen to Greenland to Italy and finally to Sri Lanka.  Each step of the way Rachel has posted what she has found via video, and/or photos. 

The third phase of the lost experience game has finally started.  This weekend at Comic Con Rachel Blake made an appearance asking a panel of Losties, including Jorge Garcia, Daniel Dae Kim, Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse, about the evils of the Hanso Foundation and more specifically WHERE IS ALVAR HANSO?  The video can be found here.  During her monologue she went on to announce that the Hanso Fondation "must be exposed" and website for phase III (hansoexposed.com).

The third phase will entail the gathering of 70 or so fragment codes in the hanso exposed website and placing them in the correct order.  Each fragment consists of a piece of the video that Rachel found in Sri Lanka which supposedly will "tear the hanso foundation apart. " On the site Rachel says:

"This is rachel
I am on the run
I have gone undergournd
What i have to show you will tear the Hanso foundation apart
They will track me if i upload it all at once or to one place
Im hiding the Sri Lank video everywhere on the web
find it put it togther
discover the truth."

Anyways, the fragment codes will be slowly released and can be found in a variety of places.  For example, "ohge" (one of the codes) was on a wristband that Jorge Garcia (Hurley) was wearing at comic con.  Other codes have been found on the hansoexposed website among other places.

The story to this point has been very extensive, with more background information than you can imagine.  There is a book entitled Bad Twin by Gary Troup, a deceased passenger of oceanic flight 815, which denounces the activities of the Hanso Foundation. You may visit Gary Troup's website to find out more about Gary Troup and his novels.  Clues have  been found embedded within Jeep, Verizon, Sprite, Monster, 43 Things, and other websites.  Passwords are sometimes almost impossible to figure out and would never be discovered without the hard work of people seriously dedicated to the game. There are many resources to help you move along in the game but the most comprehensive seems to be the lost experience clues.  These guys and the people in the comments put a lot of work into discovering clues and sharing them with "us".  There is even a weekly lost experience clues podcast which covers theories about Lost and the Lost Experience (you may subscribe via iTunes)

So, if you like Lost, and would like to participate in the final phase of this one of kind game you need to catch up!  If you have time you can go to the lost experience clues website and read through each clue.  This may be very time intensive since they are currently on the 79th clue.  You may also try looking at their weekly round-ups.  Another option is checking out Rachel's FAQ Sheet, which was just released (7-25-06) and recaps the game to this point.  If you don't want to go through all of that I will summarize it as briefly as possible.

The Hanso Foundation hides behind a cloak of philanthropy and good deeds while secretly pursuing a less than noble cause.  Alvar Hanso has been missing for quite awhile.  He was last seen by a physician in Spain and Middelwerk is now running the show at the Hanso Foundation.  Rachel started in Copenhagen where the Hanso Foundation is headquartered.  Rachel then followed Meddelwerk to Iceland where it appears that he had autistic savants working around the clock on the Valenzetti equation until the hospital mysteriously burned down.  The Valenzetti equation supposedly has the ability to predict the end of the world.  Gary Troup authored a book on this equation but the book is out of print and the book, the equation, and Valenzetti are nowhere to be found.  The Valenzetti equation appeared in Lost on the fluorescent map that John Locke saw when the hatch timer expired at 0:00.  From Greenland Rachel followed Middelwerk to Italy where he met with Peter Thompson (who sounds similar to DJ Dan in my opinion) and discussed the Valenzettit equation and Peter's cured cancer. Rachel was given the slip and The Helgus Antonius disembarked from Italy's port with Middelwerk aboard July 6th. Just before disembarking Middelwerk had a strange blood transfusion. Next Rachel was contacted by somebody alleging to be Gidgetgirl (somebody who appears to be apprised of the situation that appears in her blog) and asked to meet in Paris.  Rachel went to the park but GidgetGirl didn't show for whatever reason.  We also found out that Darla Tapp, Corporate Liason for The Global Welfare Consortium and Hugh McIntyre the Communications Director of the NPO Hanso Foundation were killed in car "accident". Then through a strange turn of events the Hanso IT guy meets with  Rachel to give her the keys to Darla and Hugh's flat where she finds the items shown in this video  (ID for Healthway alliance, Spider protocol document, a video from Darla, and a plane ticket to Sri Lanka, and a schematic of the Helgus Antonius hospital ship with wards labeled Quarantine).  It is probably worth mentioning that Darla said Middelwerk is about to do something awful.  Other notables include:

1. The Hanso group purchased a British-owned shipping company known as the East Ocean Trade Group, and renamed it the Allied Copenhagen Marine Merchants in the 50s.
2. The Black Rock was a Slave Ship
3. Rachel has made reference to her mother being dead which open up possibilities of her mother and/or father playing a role in the Hanso story or even the DHARMA initiative.
   
4. Middelwerk has been quoted as seeking "World Domination"
5. We found out what DHARMA stands for: "Department of Heuristics and Research Material Applications"
   
6. The Hanso Foundation is involved in a "Life Extension Project" and they have a 105 year old orangutan named Joop
7. Last, Many clues come through these sites: Retrievers of the Truth and Let your compass guide you, Richer Broader Depper, and Sublymonal.com.  Passwords change all the time.  See the Lost experience clues for most recent passwords.
   

Hope that helps a little.  My summary with Rachel's FAQ sheet should get you up and running.  If you are unclear about anything you can usually find the answer at the lost experience clues site.  A good resource for the frags is Matt the Pale's HansoExposed Video Fragment Code List.  I think that the game is really fun and certainly different than any other type of multimedia experience.  It only takes about ten minutes every couple days or so once you catch up with the events. Of course, you could spend a lot more time if you would like, but that is up to you.  For those of you who really want answers to the Lost phenomenon abc has  promised to deliver.  Abc has stated that at the very least we will find out what "4 8 15 16 23 42" mean and that these numbers do in fact play a significant role in Lost.

With the growing popularity of DVRs this may be a step towards a new standard for television advertisement.   It seems apparent that the entire business model of network television is going to have to be rethought to some degree and use of the internet will likely be involved.  I can certainly say that I am more aware of Sprite, Jeep, Verizon, and the rest of the lot than I would be if they were not involved in the game and resorted merely to traditional television advertisting. If you like Lost, this little game will certainly tie you over until the 3rd season begins and give you insight into the events to come. Enjoy!