Flash Forward – A New ARG Or Standard Integrated Entertainment Marketing Campaign?
Fans of Lost might have caught some interesting promos for a new show called Flash Forward that ABC is hoping will take over Lost’s audience after the final season next year. Details on Flash Forward from Zap2it:
“The show is based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel and follows the fallout from a cataclysm in which the world’s entire population blacks out for just over two minutes. In addition to dealing with the chaos that ensues when everyone wakes up — everything from car crashes to people walking off rooftops — people soon come to realize that they all had a vision of their futures. The network says that those investigating the event will have only “a huge mosaic of people’s flash forwards” to go on — hence the Mosaic Collective title for the aforementioned site.”
Yep, definitely sounds like one for the Lost crowd, especially given Lost’s strong character development through use of Flashbacks.
Admittedly, I didn’t initially see the promos but according to the LA Times Show Tracker for Lost, they were images of someone surfing, a sonogram, a group of kids leaving school, a bride and groom kissing and pallbearers carrying a coffin. A fan site called FlashForwardTV also has video clips of the images.
A promotional site for Flash Forward is at Mosaic Collective and I imagine somehow the site will evolve through stories around each image.
I’m definitely a fan of ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games) so it will be interesting to see how this campaign evolves and if it can become more than a standard integrated entertainment marketing campaign. ARG’s in entertainment have a long history going back to the likes of A.I. and ILoveBees and have gotten more sophisticated over the years. Fringe is the latest example of this with their commercial break images and symbols forming some type of alphabet code…