I usually don't find these kinds of things, but last night when I was watching Lost, I saw an ad that just didn't seem right.
The ad made a reference to making a "better future" and referred to the Hanso foundation. I followed the URL (www.letyourcompassbeyourguide.com) in the ad and it took me to an interesting page. It worked last night, during the episode, but not tonight. Hmm.
The page simply a compass needle that would follow your mouse pointer. There was a hyperlink that would take you to another page.
There was some mumbo-jumbo quasi unix shell stuff that asked the question "Are you one of the good ones?"
If you answered no, you were taken to the Hanso Foundation webpage.
If you answered yes, you were taken to what looked like a backdoor into the Hanso Foundation user accounts. I don't remember the URL...
I stumbled upon an Easter Egg... I poked around and then found some references to a book that didn't speak too highly of the Hanso Foundation, Bad Twin published by Hyperion Books. I looked for that on the web and I found it and it refers to the last writings of the author Gary Traub before he went down on Oceanic Flight 815.
What I find surprising is that I actually found all this. I don't usually catch these things. As I've been trying to reconstruct what I did last night, I've discovered that this is part of some interactive online game... I found a blog at TV Guide that refers to this...
Now isn't all this interesting?
2 comments:
The last four episodes have had these Hanso Foundation commercials about three-quarters of the way through. The first commercial had a number: 1-877-HANSORG, with a recording that has changed at least once. The second commercial had the url URL: http://www.hansorg.com. The next one was http://www.bornamerican.com. You saw the most recent one. Bad Twin is a manuscript that Sawyer was reading until Jack tossed it into the first. The day after I saw that episode, I was at the airport and saw it in the airport concessions. The guys at ABC have a crack marketing team for Lost, clearly a bunch of geeks who have either played or have heard of games like "I Love Bees". I can't wait to see what they do next!
I kept seeing the Hanso Foundation commercials and thinking "That sounds a lot like the Dharma Initiative, only real. I bet it's just as shady." I guess that's why gullible isn't in the dictionary. That's cool that you followed the link and found all that interesting stuff. I heard a while back that they were going to be putting easter eggs in the commercials during the show, but I thought it was just going to be some lame reference in a Pepsi commercial. This is far more clever.
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