Derek Johnson
The Fictional Institutions of
Lost:
World Building, Reality, and the Economic Possibilities of Narrative Divergence
In ‘Tricia Tanaka is Dead,’ (3.10), castaway Hurley (Jorge Garcia) happens upon a
mysterious, run-down van in the jungle, and endeavours to coax it back to life. While
Hurley lacks appropriate tools—much less replacement parts—to complete this task,
the decades-old case of beer that he finds in the back of the van provides him the
perfect enticement with which to enlist the help of fellow castaways Jin (Daniel Dae
Kim) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway). Like many television programmes of the past,
Lost chooses to disguise the corporate origins and brand identity of the beer-filled van
that Hurley happens across. Though its unique shape betrays the van as a classic VW
Bus, the iconic Volkswagen logo is replaced by the stark, black-and-white, octagonal
imprint of the fictional Dharma Initiative, the mysterious research group whose prior
presence on the island has yet to be fully explained. Similarly, the Dharma logo marks
the beer in the van as an off-brand—just as unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and un-
consumable by the viewer at home as the generic bottles of ‘cola’ and ‘breakfast
flakes’ that might have sat on the kitchen tables of previous television families like the
Bradys or Huxtables.
And yet, in the real world removed from
Lost’s monsters, mysteries, and magnetic
fields, these fictional imprints have taken on a cultural and economic significance that
transcends similar generic status. Real people walk down the street wearing Dharma
2
baseball caps, headed to work where they might drink coffee out of a Dharma-
emblazoned mug and procrastinate by exploring the web space of the fictional Hanso
Foundation that supposedly funds Dharma. Meanwhile, other fictional brands of
consumables established on the series have bled into the real world; like Hurley,
Lost
viewers can now buy and eat Apollo candy bars.
Of course, only a very few allow the fictional institutions of
Lost to so permeate their
experience of the real world—those devoted fans willing to spend time and money on
Lost merchandise. These specialized nodes for experiencing the
Lost world
undoubtedly capture added merchandising revenues for its producer-distributor ABC,
but as a niche market (not even inclusive of all hardcore
Lost fans), products marked
with fictional imprints like Dharma, Hanso, and Apollo seem inadequate and counter-
intuitive in the current broadcast television economy. As the bread-and-butter
advertising revenues paid to American networks like ABC by
real corporations
becomes increasingly hard to come by (due to increasing competition between media
outlets), commercial comedies and dramas have, by and large, moved to foreground
those real corporations within the story itself. On other contemporary American
primetime serials, a beer-filled van would surely have presented not just impetus for
character action, but also lucrative opportunities for product placement. The producers
of
24 (Imagine Entertainment, 2001-) for example, repeatedly enter into contractual
relations with automakers like Ford and Toyota, agreeing to outfit heroes like Jack
Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) exclusively with their products each season.
Heroes (NBC
Universal Television, 2006-) made a similar arrangement with Nissan, allowing Hiro’s
3
(Masi Oka) preference for the Versa to become a plot point in an early first season
episode. Programmes like
The 4400 (Renegade 83, 2004-) and
Entourage (HBO, 2004)
strike like deals with alcohol distributors like Budweiser and Skyy Vodka, respectively.
Automobiles and alcohol, therefore, comprise only two of the innumerable markets
that might seem to be product placement no-brainers.
So while Hurley takes full economic advantage of the van and the booze, the producers
of
Lost miss a similar opportunity. Would not Budweiser or Miller Genuine Draft
have been thrilled to cough up some cash to be presented as the beer with the
everlasting flavour to make such a satisfying reward for Sawyer? What automaker
would not have loved to see a popular character like Hurley take so much interest in
their van and ultimately use it to stage a heroic rescue in the subsequent season finale?
Nevertheless, instead of building content around sponsors’ brands,
Lost emphasizes the
assumedly less lucrative project of showcasing the fictional Dharma logo. Despite its
non-existence in the ‘real’ world of global capital, Dharma has been emphasized
diegetically as a brand of its own, its imprint appearing throughout the second and
third seasons of the series on consumable goods like wine, macaroni and cheese,
cornflakes, and composition notebooks. Apparently, Dharma makes and packages its
own brands of durable and consumable goods, shutting out corporate suppliers from
the real world. In the world of
Lost, the Dharma brand, not those of sponsors, takes
priority.
4
Viewed with rose-tinted glasses, this failure to cater to real-world corporate sponsors
could be ascribed to the producers’ greater artistic commitment to establishing the
enigmatic Dharma Initiative’s prior presence and continuing impact on the island.
Supposedly founded in 1970 by University of Michigan graduate students and the
similarly fictional Hanso Foundation to conduct inter-disciplinary scientific and social
research across the globe, Dharma studied the castaways’ island until the early 1990s,
when a group of as-yet-unidentified hostiles violently drove them off. The series has
used its trademark flashbacks to introduce a few characters that worked under the
Dharma banner (like the mysterious name-changing doctor in the orientation films and
Roger, the workman Hurley later finds dead in the van). Yet the castaways’
interactions with the initiative occur primarily at the institutional level: not through
characters, but through the Dharma-constructed infrastructure of mysterious hatches,
communication towers that promise contact with civilization, and food and supply
provisions (that, as the episode ‘Lockdown’ (2.17) suggests, Dharma may continue to
deliver, if only by automation). Because Dharma manifests itself primarily as an
institution, Dharma-brand products as in ‘Tricia Tanaka is Dead’ prove integral to the
producers’ plotting and world building efforts. Marked goods like automobiles and
alcohol render the faceless Dharma visually tangible as a narrative agent; the
integration of real world products instead would superficially trade story world depth
for a quick buck. Nor could producers easily have their cake and eat it too by stocking
those Dharma hatches with name brand products for the castaways to consume; while
producers may have indeed recognized the potential for product placement inherent in
the second season introduction of the hatches, the contingent, indefinite nature of the
5
Dharma Initiative would mitigate its attractiveness to potential sponsors. The
institution might seem a benevolent, utopian research group one day, but later plot
developments could make it a villainous cabal bent on world domination—and few
corporations want to be recognized as the official sponsor and supplier of evil.
Dedication to deep transmedia storytelling and world building ambitions, therefore,
could rationalize
Lost’s dismissal of product placement strategies embraced by other
television series.
That unsatisfactory explanation, however, ignores the economic realities of
contemporary television, and the increasing extension of television and displacement
of advertiser interest into the digital realm of the Internet and viral video. If so many
other narrative series have taken on product placement as a means of funding
production, how could
Lost afford such dedication to the story alone? How were
economic needs in a depressed advertising market alternatively met if, given the story
the producers wanted to tell, product placement could not be relied upon as it has been
on other narrative series? Could the generation of fictional, branded institutions like
Dharma actually serve to satisfy those economic exigencies in another way?
To explore these possibilities, this chapter first investigates the economic factors
driving
Lost to experiment with new forms and strategies of promotion, storytelling,
and extension of fictional brands. What kind of revenue models prove necessary in a
weakened broadcasting market in the United States? How do different television
genres and modes of storytelling collaborate or confound those economic needs?
6
Second, this chapter examines how branded fictional institutions on
Lost like Dharma
and Hanso have been constructed by producers and engaged with by audiences, both
on television and across media platforms. How has the narrative divergence of
Lost
across a range of media introduced fictional brands within the spaces and experiences
of everyday life? How do these fictional entities become truly
institutionalized as
structures with which audiences, not just characters, interact? Lastly, this paper
explores how
Lost’s institutional focus on fictional corporations could serve a counter-
intuitive economic end in an industrial moment where programmemes must
increasingly foreground real brands within their stories. How might institutionalized
fictional brands be developed into alternative revenue models? Why would fictional
corporations prove advantageous in making narrative series like
Lost attractive to real
corporate interests? Ultimately,
Lost strikes a unique relationship between fictional
storytelling and ‘reality’—both the lived realm of everyday life, and the television
genre in which non-traditional revenue models have thrived. By refusing to use real
corporations in lieu of fictional institutions within the story,
Lost erects a diegetic
boundary that prevents it from following reality TV’s lead in designing content around
sponsors. In extending those fictional institutions across media and into the real world,
however, everyday life overlaps the narrative of
Lost, allowing real corporate
institutions like Sprite and Jeep to become both producers of content and content
themselves.
Lost eschews the product placement of reality TV, but it has proven
attractive to advertisers for offering fictional institutions with which real corporations
can interface in the mediation of everyday life.
7
The Economic Challenges of Broadcast Television
The American television industry has undergone considerable transition in the last
decade, with the networks increasingly reliant on the reality genre and, as a result,
decreasingly investing in narrative properties like
Lost. As Chad Raphael argues,
reality television emerges in the 1990s as ‘a cost-cutting solution’ for media
conglomerates whose merger debt made traditional deficit financing unattractive, but
who simultaneously desired a means of in-house production following the removal of
the Fin-Syn restrictions that previously prohibited networks from owning the series
they distributed.1 Similarly, Ted Magder suggests that the reality genre has introduced
entirely new economic models to the television industry. Concerns about viewers
skipping commercials via digital video recorders (DVRs) have required networks to
respond to the changing needs of skittish advertisers: ‘what reality TV and formats
reveal most of all is that the traditional revenue model used to produce commercial
television is becoming anachronistic. We are entering a new era of product placement
and integration, merchandising, pay-per-view, and multiplatform content.’2
As feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner argues, product placement, or brand
integration, ‘is largely responsible for the reality-TV genre as we know it today, and
not vice versa.’ The networks followed the course set by programmes like
Survivor
(Mark Burnett Productions, 2000-) —in which castaway contestants compete for
products like Mountain Dew in immunity challenges—when they realized that instead
of ‘the network paying actors, advertisers would pay the network for a starring role.’3
Though spot advertising persists for reality television in the United States, these
8
programmemes recall the days of single sponsorship prior to the quiz show scandals in
the late 1950s; sponsors, their products, and their iconic logos have literally becomes a
part of reality TV programmes. On the ratings behemoth
American Idol (Fremantle
Media North America, 2002-) for examine, judges drink from Coca-Cola glasses, and
sets feature Coke iconography. Simultaneously, finalists produce weekly music videos
promoting Ford automobiles that appear during the episode. In exchange for this
product visibility, Coke, Ford, and third major sponsor AT&T have paid the Fox
network over $20 million each per year.4
In the wake of this shift,
Lost must have seemed like a disadvantaged relic—all the
castaways and tropical trimmings of something like
Survivor, but with a diegetic
boundary to keep products from reality out. When Matt Roush praises
Lost in his
review for
Broadcasting and Cable, he singles out the programme for its lack of a
franchise brand, lack of a formula, lack of big stars in a huge ensemble cast, and its
very existence outside of the reality genre—all qualities that made
Lost a
less attractive
product in the changing industrial climate.5 The critical enthusiasm mustered by
Roush followed in large part from
Lost’s rejection of the strategies currently being
experimented with to appeal to advertisers. But in a new world where the resources
needed to support traditional, more expensive fictional television had become
increasingly scarce,
Lost may have been a narratively compelling dinosaur, but it
remained a dinosaur nonetheless. Consequently, advertisers looked at
Lost in its initial,
single-platform configuration with disdain. As late as September 2004, just prior to
the series’ premiere, the trade journal
Adweek lumped
Lost among several scripted
9
series described by media buyers as ‘clunkers,’ including such short lived scripted
series as
Father of the Pride (Dreamworks Television, 2004-2005),
Listen Up
(Regency Television, 2004-2005) and
Center of the Universe (CBS Television, 2004-
2005).6
While the report does not explicitly state how
Lost earned this dubious distinction,
shifting industrial attitudes and discourses over the past few years might account for
the lack of advertiser interest. As one
Advertising Age editorial puts it,
Video is Killing TV… the ad industry is undergoing a semantic shift
that's ousting broadcast TV as its central organizing principle. In its
place, a more flexible notion of video is emerging …every ad agency is
trying to structure itself to produce more digital content and escape the
box of the 30-second-spot.7
Analysts predict heavy revenue losses in television’s future as advertisers increasingly
turn to media forms that enable them to connect with viewers outside the broadcasting
context of the spot advertisement.8 To stem this tide, broadcasting would have to adapt
its operations to the new economic reality by sweetening the opportunities available to
advertisers on television. The flood of reality shows that dominated network television
development and scheduling prior to the scripted revival that arguably followed in
Lost’s wake, therefore, can be seen as part of an industrial attempt to provide more
flexible options to media buyers during this time of change. To advertisers in 2004,
however,
Lost offered not more flexibility, but instead more of the same.
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World Building as Institution Building
Given the networks’ increased doubts about the economic viability of scripted
programming,
Lost’s rejection of brand integration in favour of developing in-world
fictional institutions like Dharma appears all the more bold—even counterintuitive—in
the face of marketplace demands. Contextualizing
Lost within larger creative and
economic trends as well as a longer history of world building, however, puts into
historical perspective the series’ attempts to create fictional institutions and then install
them within the everyday realms of the real world.
Lost is certainly not the first television series to expend a great deal of energy
extending elements of its narrative not just across media platforms, but also into the
spaces and experiences of everyday life. Christopher Anderson argues that the
Disneyland television series in 1955, for example, worked to enhance Disney’s theme
park operations by blurring the line between programme and place to create an
inhabitable textual space coterminous with consumers’ everyday lives:
Whereas traditional notions of textuality assume that a text is singular,
unified, and autonomous, with a structure that draws the viewer inward,
Disney’s television texts were, from the outset, fragmented, propelled
by a centrifugal force that guided the viewer away from the immediate
textual experience toward a more pervasive sense of textuality, one that
encouraged the consumption of further Disney texts, further Disney
products, further Disney experiences.9
11
Disney characters and stories were not confined to closed texts, but began to seep into
the lived spaces of consumption and tourism. Rather than draw the consumer into the
Disney world, the Disney world was propelled outward into the real world of the
consumer. More recently, Jeffrey Sconce has identified in the television industry of
the 1980s and 90s an increased attention to what he calls ‘world building,’ the
construction of complex narrative universes that use the relative diegetic depth of
episodic television to cultivate new forms of audience engagement in an increasingly
fragmented and competitive media marketplace.10
Examining similar trends in the 90s, Kurt Lancaster examines how the series
Babylon
5 (Babylonian Productions, 1994-1998) manifests itself as a concrete universe, or
‘imaginary entertainment environment’, where television textuality spills not only into
ancillary markets, but also into the spaces of everyday life. The diegetic depth of the
series lent itself to deployment across media platforms via licensed card games, for
example, which in turn gave a physical tangibility to the diegesis as a real place in
which viewers could perform roles and take actions through play.11 Similar arguments
have been made by Janet Murray, who predicts that the increasing marriage of
television and new media forms will lead not only to more complex narrative worlds,
but simultaneously a greater opportunity to occupy ‘a contiguous virtual space and
experience events, in persona, that are also happening to the characters in the series.’12
Lost’s attempts to spill its narrative institutions into the spaces of the everyday might
indeed substantiate Murray’s predictions, but these textual structures are part of a
12
much larger historical trajectory of dispersing the television world into other texts and
experiential contexts.
To understand the serial storytelling of
Lost in its full ‘narrative complexity’,13 we
need to examine the aggregate interrelationships not just between television episodes,
but also across media platforms and spaces of consumption. The experiences of
narratives and the fictional institutions contained within them will change as serial
television content moves out of the box sitting in the living room and across a range of
media platforms and space. These exchanges and extensions between television and
digital platforms have been discussed variably by media scholars as ‘overflow’,14
‘hyperseriality’,15 and perhaps most prominently by Henry Jenkins and others as
‘convergence…the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation
between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of audiences who will
go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.’16
While these perspectives offer useful lenses for conceptualizing contemporary
television’s presence across a variety of media platforms, the articulation of such
‘transmedia storytelling’17 to the new aesthetics of digital culture potentially limits our
comprehension of shows like
Lost in at least two significant ways. First, we might
miss not only the non-digital historical precedents for world building across media, but
also the way in which old, analog media maintain a persistent importance in
contemporary convergence narratives: as we will see, print media like newspapers and
paperback novels play an important role in the transmedia network of a property like
Lost. Second, the metaphor of convergence threatens to obscure the way in which the
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serialized, cross-platform structure of
Lost’s narrative simultaneously constitutes a
coordinated narrative
divergence. Instead of converging into a single, digital medium,
the piecemeal narrative of
Lost must be parsed together from clues dispersed across a
series of media. In the same tradition as Disney textuality in the 1950s, the divergence
of the fragmented text across media platforms enables it to pervade everyday space and
experience. In its participation in convergence culture,
Lost is not a singular televisual
narrative, but a manifold, multiplatform, divergent narrative often experienced outside
of television or any single medium. Given that dispersed textuality is an historical
phenomenon, are
Lost’s current experiments with the fictional Dharma’s pervading
everyday space in a manner similar to real institutions nothing new?
The fictional television world of
Lost , like the real world, is structured by institutions.
The actions that characters take occur in a world in which the same institutional bodies
appear and reappear as fixtures of everyday life; from Oceanic Airlines to the Apollo
candy bar, there are companies and products with recognizable images and logos that
pervade the fictional world of
Lost. While only introduced at the beginning of the
second season, the fictional Dharma Initiative, funded by the philanthropic Hanso
Foundation, has become a pillar of
Lost mythology and a central site of ongoing
narrative enigma. In the third season, increasingly important alongside these
institutions became corporate entities like the Widmore Corporation, the company run
by the father of Desmond’s long lost love, and Mittelos Bioscience, the company that
purportedly recruited Juliet to conduct fertility experiments on the island on behalf of
the Others. These organizations have their hand in everything that has occurred on the
14
series, either directly or indirectly, and as such provide a consistent backbone to
support the entire
Lost universe. The mystery of the island is in large part an
institutional mystery—what is it that attracted these institutions to the island, what did
these entities do with all those hatches once they got there, and what role, if any, might
these institutions have played in bringing the castaways to the island? The ubiquitous
nature of these institutions in the
Lost universe is such that they pervade the narrative
even in episodes that are not purportedly ‘about’ them, often buried in the visuals of
the mise-en-scene. If we look closely enough, we see that it is Widmore Labs, for
example, that not only built or sponsored Henry Gale’s hot air balloon, but also
manufactured the pregnancy tests taken in several different episodes by Sun (Yunjin
Kim), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Juliet’s sister Rachel (Robin Weigert).
Lost has
become famous for the interconnections between its characters (we learn, for instance,
that the fathers of both Jack (Matthew Fox) and Kate have played crucial roles in the
lives of other castaways) yet less noticed is that these character relations all occur
within a similar network of institutions. The series acquires depth and coherency as a
narrative universe—what Matt Hills calls ‘hyperdiegesis’—in large part because of the
omnipresent nature of these reappearing and very visible institutions. These structural
entities glue
Lost together as ‘a vast, detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which
is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to
operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.’18 Much of the
Lost
universe remains unseen, but the institutional nexus of Oceanic, Dharma, Hanso,
Mittelos, Widmore, Apollo, et al suggests its extensive expanse. The world building
project of
Lost is very much an institution building project.
15
This alone does not distinguish
Lost from other ‘cult’ television series that could also
be described as hyperdiegetic. Institution building has played a large role in the
Star
Trek franchise, for example, in which it is the specific, recognizable institutionalism of
Starfleet—its command structures, Prime Directive, uniforms, and insignia—that
allows different sets of characters operating in different time frames and parts of the
galaxy to be understood as part of the same narrative universe (rather than the same
genre writ large). The mythology of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Mutant Enemy, 1997-
2003) is similarly dependent on the institution of the Watcher’s Council that has
trained female slayers since the beginning of recorded history. More recently,
24 has
pushed the creation of fictional institutions in more civic-minded, almost mundane,
directions, generating a narrative playground for itself by constructing new law
enforcement agencies like the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that can interact with
recognizable, real world institutions like Homeland Security and the Office of the
President. Unlike
Star Trek, the hyperdiegetic space
24 constructs overlaps and
intersects with the real world institutions that structure the everyday lives of audiences.
This is a significant development in world building, blurring the boundaries between
hyperdiegetic and everyday space.
Lost’s institutions may be fictional, but like those
of
24, they prove more compatible with mundane, everyday institutions. Yet if
24
offers a civic-minded hyperdiegesis,
Lost provides a more corporate-minded set of
fictional institutions, joining series like
Angel (Mutant Enemy, 199-2004),
Arrested
Development (Imagine Entertainment, 2003-2006), and
The Office (BBC, 2001-2003)
that have created fictional companies like Wolfram and Hart, the Bluth Company, and
16
Wernham-Hogg, respectively, to support narrative worlds fundamentally structured by
corporate culture.
Lost’s significance lies in its development of a set of fictional
institutions that can interact with the non-fantastic, mundane, corporate institutions of
everyday life, a capacity giving the fictional institution-building project of
Lost greater
economic viability in the current television market. While the fictional institutions of
Star Trek have certainly contributed to the generation of countless billions of dollars
for that franchise, the institutions of
Lost establish that fictional universe as one
coterminous with our own, in which real corporations too can become key institutional
players.
Bringing Sponsors into Production and into the World
Lost continues a historical trajectory of pervasive, divergent, hyperdiegetic textuality
that allows narrative spaces to spill into the spaces of the everyday, but it does so in a
way specifically adapted to a shifting television economy in which the economic
viability of lavish narrative programming has come into question and opportunities for
sponsor participation in the story world have become increasingly advantageous.
While producers and executives certainly did not transform
Lost from a single-
platform television series into a multiplatform, divergent narrative
solely for economic
reasons, this development, regardless of its creative motivation, helped to make this
‘clunker’ into a cherry more attractive to media buyers.
Prior to the 2004 premiere, ABC increased
Lost’s public visibility by experimenting
with new promotional strategies: as one trade article put it, the decline of broadcast
17
viewership meant that networks could ‘no longer depend solely on promoting their
new shows with their own on-air promotions, as they need to reach people who aren't
watching TV.’19 Lagging behind in the ratings, a desperate ABC hired a number of
specialized marketing firms to help it find creative ways to connect content with
viewers. One of the resultant campaigns designed for
Lost targeted vacationers by
leaving messages in bottles on sandy beaches. This campaign first moved
Lost into the
realm of the everyday, taking its promotions off air and into the spaces in which
vacationers—indeed a valuable market to tap—relaxed away from the television set.
By moving the series’ castaway theme to physical spaces, these bottles created
exposure and additional media coverage in the press. Simultaneously,
Lost promoters
experimented with web sites positioned as non-fictional, including an official site for
Oceanic Air and a fan page for the diegetic band Drive Shaft. Due to the overall
effectiveness of this summer campaign and
Lost’s unexpected ratings success in the
fall, executives expected to see similar non-traditional marketing campaigns follow,
hoping to get audiences to ‘stumble’ upon programmes when away from the
television.20 And thanks to that surprising performance, media buyers immediately
began to re-evaluate the cool reception they had given
Lost. That success enabled
ABC to use
Lost as a pathfinder for developing new kinds of revenue models around
fictional programming. In 2005,
Lost was among the first fee-based television content
available on iTunes, and by 2006, ABC was using the series as a draw for its
experimental distribution of free, ad-supported content online.21 Based in part on the
strength of
Lost, ABC was able to attract ten sponsors to the trial, in which viewers
18
would be given the choice of viewing a traditional spot, or playing an advertiser-
sponsored game in exchange for viewing an episode.
Despite this success,
Lost itself remained the sugar that made tolerable the bad
medicine of advertisements. While advertiser-sponsored games may indeed have been
fun, the pleasures of
Lost itself remained cordoned off from sponsors’ products by the
diegetic boundary between its narrative world and the advertising and promotional
apparatus—unlike the attractive integration offered by reality TV.
Survivor’s
castaways competed for Mountain Dew, while
Lost’s castaways remained removed
from the extra-diegetic world of sponsoring products like Sprite. In spot
advertisements, sponsoring products remained external to the content desired by
audiences. Though the network could force advertisement viewing in these
experimental online venues, the popularity of
Lost with DVR users sustained the
economic disadvantage of spot advertisements. DVR viewing exacerbated the need to
develop alternatives to traditional broadcasting revenue models: though
Lost’s status as
the fourth-most DVR-ed programme in 2005 signalled its popularity with
technologically elite audiences, it also suggested that advertising time purchased
during
Lost was among the most at-risk to be skipped by viewers. As Jim Edwards
points out in
Brandweek, though product placement appears most ubiquitously in
reality TV designed to thwart commercial skippers and is used most ubiquitously in
reality series, no reality series ranks among the top ten most DVR-ed programmes, so
advertisers would benefit more from placing products in scripted series. But as
Edwards argues, scripted television is too much of a battleground: ‘writers, producers,
19
networks, directors, and talent all have to be taken into account before a brand can
appear.’22 In the words of one executive: ‘It’s not like in reality where any brand or
any product will do.’23 To stand on equal footing with reality TV’s attractiveness to
media buyers then,
Lost needed to find the right brand.
Unfortunately, the literal isolation of
Lost’s setting and characters from corporate
brands and consumer lifestyles made this a tall order. Because the
Lost narrative
lacked any kind of institutional connection to the real world, there was no point of
entry for any potential sponsor. So while the introduction of Dharma and Hanso may
have emerged in response to storytelling needs, it had a pleasing side effect of now
allowing the series to support a brand of its own—a fictional institution that could
serve as an intermediary, an interface, between the story world of the show and the
corporate world of sponsors and consumers. As early as November 2004, the
producers were promising a revamped, ‘considerably different’ season two.24 When
those changes arrived the next October, the series’ focus shifted away from life on the
beach to the castaways’ discovery and operation of a series of underground
installations left behind by the mysterious Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative.
Ultimately, along with ‘a whole new set of questions to ponder’,25 these institutions
gave
Lost a connectivity to the realm of global institutions, that however fictional,
enabled the series to bring down the diegetic boundaries between narrative and
marketing.
20
The capability to bring down those boundaries, however, did not automatically
generate sponsor interest. With little creative control over the long term development
of Dharma and Hanso on television, direct interface with those fictional institutions
remained a dicey proposition for potential sponsors. Yet if the institutional umbrella of
Hanso and Dharma widened to encompass experiences in media spaces outside of
television that sponsors
could more handily control, creative and economic
relationships between the fictional institutions of
Lost and the corporate institutions of
sponsors would become more tenable. If their institutional imprint exceeded the
bounds of television, Hanso and Dharma could interact and have business relations
with other real-world institutions in the spaces
outside of television less centrally
controlled by television writers. So following the start of the second season in fall
2005, Coca-Cola and three other sponsoring partners joined ABC to develop a viral
marketing campaign that would transform
Lost from a single-platform television
narrative into a divergent set of media experiences. The idea was to make brands like
Coca-Cola’s Sprite into key players in a mystery strewn across media platforms,
integrating those brands into the expanded
Lost narrative.26 This is not to suggest that
Lost found a means of generating more revenue streams than through product
placement. Instead, through the expansion of the hyperdiegetic into the realm of the
everyday,
Lost discovered a means of maintaining sponsor interest in expensive,
expansive narrative television by setting a place for corporate marketers both within
the sphere of production and within the story itself.
21
The resultant, coordinated transformation of
Lost from a television text to a divergent,
multiplatform launched as the alternate reality game (ARG) ‘The Lost Experience’ in
Summer 2006. The primary narrative function of the game was to explore enigmas
that had accrued over the course of two seasons—what did the mysterious 4-8-15-16-
23-42 number sequence mean, and most importantly, how was it connected to the
institutional presence of Dharma and Hanso on the island? But rather than answer
these questions in a direct, narratively linear manner, the ARG buried the extended
Lost narrative amid a range of consumption experiences through the careful
coordination of content deployed successively through television and newspaper
advertisements, public appearances, corporate websites, published novels, podcasts,
guerilla video, and even candy distribution. To piece the narrative together over the
course of the summer, viewers would have to pool their collective intelligence and
talents.27 This coordinated multiplatform deployment of content positioned the viewer
not as an external spectator looking in on the story, but as a resident situated within the
diegetic universe in which that story unfolded. The game hailed the viewer player as
an investigator of the mysterious Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative, inviting
them to look for clues amid advertisements and promotions that they experienced as a
quotidian part of everyday life, not as part of a televisual narrative diegetically bound
off from it.
Experiencing
Lost outside of television, therefore, simultaneously meant moving
inside
its narrative world. The fictional institutions Hanso and Dharma, not fictional
characters or narrative threads, enabled viewers to experience everyday life as part of
22
the
Lost hyperdiegesis—not just in the digital realm, but across a range of mediated
experience. Advertisements supposedly paid for by the Hanso foundation aired during
ABC programmes, pointing viewers to the Hanso website where they could search for
clues on a site that hailed them not as
Lost viewers, but as web surfers sharing the
Foundation’s philanthropic interests. Print advertisements begged newspaper readers
to discount claims made about Hanso by the tie-in novel
Bad Twin. As the game
continued, digital podcasts and guerilla videos emerged, purporting to reveal to the
public the truth about the real Hanso foundation—but they did so in concert with
analog content deployed throughout everyday mediated spaces.
Staged public appearances on
Jimmy Kimmel Live (Jackhole Industries, 2003-) and at
the San Diego Comic Con even went so far as to purport that while
Lost was fictional,
the Hanso Foundation had a real history worthy of both cover-up and investigation. At
Comic Con, ‘Rachel Blake’ (the anti-Hanso guerilla blogger), interrupted the
producers’ discussion of the show and attacked the writers for their complicity with a
real-life Dharma-Hanso agenda. The producers played along with the fantasy, not
denying the real-life existence of such fictional institutions, but quashing her
conspiracy theory by claiming that they took dramatic license in their portrayal of
them—a response met tersely by Blake: ‘you’re liars. You’re promoting them as some
kind of force for good. But they’re not.’ If Comic Con brought these institutions into
the spaces of reality by attacking them, Jimmy Kimmel did so by defending them,
giving airtime to ‘Hugh McIntyre,’ the communications director for Hanso. Framed as
a public relations intervention, McIntyre claimed that ‘the writers and producers of
23
Lost have decided to attach themselves to our foundation.’ Promoting Hanso’s major
projects around the globe, McIntryre admitted that Dharma ‘was a real project’, but
that ‘it’s just not true, the way [
Lost’s producers are] colouring the project.’ Both the
Comic Con and
Jimmy Kimmel Live incidents contrasted
Lost’s fictional status with the
purported real-life existence of Dharma-Hanso, constructing them as bigger and more
real than the television programme from which they originated. Without a doubt, the
fact that these new web portals, printed products, and promotional appearances could
network across distribution outlets owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC,
presented an opportunity for classically synergistic revenue multiplication. The appeal
of a single property like
Lost could be used to generate sales of other Disney-owned
books, ratings for other Disney-owned television programmes, and hits for other
Disney-owned web spaces. But the institutionalization of
Lost across the spaces of
everyday life presented further economic possibilities.
As Marie-Laure Ryan claims, the careful construction required of narrative becomes
all too fragile and chaotic when too many interactors have the ability to impact an
interactive story.28 It would be nearly impossible for an ARG like ‘The Lost
Experience’ to construct any kind of meaningful interactive narrative in which all
participants could be friends with Jack, Sawyer, and Kate without sacrificing the
agency of those participants in the story world. But by shifting the focus away from
characters and towards institutions, the ARG sidestepped these obstacles, generating
larger infrastructures that could be effectively shared by a wider range of participants.
Players need not encounter familiar
Lost characters to know they inhabit the
Lost
24
world, because they interact with it through their shared institutional experiences. Just
as Jack, Kate, and Sawyer live in a world structured by Dharma and Hanso, so too do
the players of the
Lost ARG. Television characters and ARG players have separate
experiences and encounters, but they all occur within the same institutional
superstructure. But perhaps most importantly for the argument forwarded here, the
manner in which the institutions of
Lost decentralize the narrative world (no longer
dependent on the central stories represented by Jack, Kate, and Sawyer on the island)
simultaneously decentralizes the creative power of constructing that world. Not only
do these fictional institutions allow viewers to operative narratively within the Lost
universe, but they also provide an interface with which other cultural institutions might
enter the story as both content and producers of that content.
Over the course of the second season, the development of ‘The Lost Experience’
moved beyond synergistic Disney tie-ins, reaching out to other corporate interests that
could partner with ABC to take advantage of the blurred line between
Lost’s
institutions and the institutionalized spaces of everyday life. In interacting with the
Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative as if they were real, viewer-players easily
entered into a narrative space that would accept the sponsors affiliated with those
institutions as legitimate players and sources of narrative detail. Instead of asking
viewers to play as compensation for being granted access to the
Lost universe, Sprite-
based games could now be played from
within the
Lost universe by consumers
playacting as corporate-investigating culture jamming hackers. Similarly, Sprite’s
‘Sub-lymonal’ television commercials ceased to be advertisement, and became
25
potential sources of narrative revelation to be mined for clues to
Lost’s enigmas.
Monster.com, a web site that allows users to browse job listings and post their own
resumes, also participated in this institutionalization of the Hanso Foundation, listing
Hanso job openings throughout ‘The Lost Experience’. In doing so, the corporate
operations of Monster.com became narratively operative as a source of information
about Hanso’s hiring practices.
Even more adeptly, the web of clues and narrative threads offered that summer by ‘The
Lost Experience’ directed viewer-players to an official Jeep website, where nosy
visitors could exploit a convenient security lapse and pry through corporate documents
that detailed the relationship between Hanso, Dharma, and Daimler Chrysler. Daimler
Chrysler literally becomes a player in the narrative as the unwitting supplier of the Jeep
Compass vehicles used by Hanso to illegally transport human organs in South Africa.
Examining the evidence exposes us to the new Compass schematics, but also gives the
corporation a chance to distance itself from the nefarious schemes of Hanso. The fake
memos hidden on the site could take the time to make it clear that while Chrysler did
supply Hanso with top quality merchandise, the automaker would never knowingly aid
and abet human organ trafficking. As a partner in ABC’s institutional deployment of
Lost across media platforms, Jeep marketers enjoy a decentralized creative control
unavailable on traditional narrative television written under the aegis of a writing staff.
Able to frame its own operations in interaction with Hanso, Jeep can shape its
association with this fictional corporation as much or even to a greater degree than it
could with product placement. When narrative encompasses the corporate realm of
26
everyday life, the economic exchanges between viewer and advertiser can take place in
the context of the narrative. As a report in
Advertising Age explains, ‘The Lost
Experience’ provided the ‘must-see, bite-sized content…[that]…advertisers have been
seeking as the world of multiplatform programming explodes.’29 By tying its fictional
institutions to those of reality,
Lost was able to refit narrative television for integrated
marketing in the age of reality TV, moving brand integration outside of the fictional
and into a space sponsors could control.
In institutionalizing the Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative, however,
Lost not
only created a space for the integration of sponsors’ brands, but also created a brand
for itself that it could begin to leverage on its own. Like many series, ABC markets
products stamped with the
Lost logo that acknowledge the fictional status of the series
itself; but alongside these more traditional merchandising efforts have arisen a
supplementary line of products that, like the
Jimmy Kimmel and Comic Con
appearances, position fictional institutions as bigger and more real than the fiction
from which they came. Yet while those appearances might be best described as
promotion, these product lines generate revenue in their own right. While currently
limited in scope, a line of Dharma-branded merchandise has emerged that perpetuates
the illusion of the institution’s reality and maintains its presence in the spaces of
everyday life. On ABC.com, one can buy not just Dharma-branded T-shirts and hats
that increase the institution’s presence in quotidian life when the user wears them
about, but also Dharma-brand composition books (just like those used in the Pearl
station!). The fact that these composition books come in a set of three suggests that
27
while severely overpriced—$14.95 for the set, plus shipping—they are packaged for
eventual consumption, designed to be used and replaced. While a relatively obscure
tie-in product, these notebooks constitute a significant step in tie-in marketing: these
are not just
Lost collectibles, but a line of consumable goods sold on the brand name of
Dharma. While it may seem far fetched to imagine the actual distribution and
marketing of Dharma beer, macaroni, and automobiles, the potential for further
mobilization and capitalization on the Dharma brand seems conceivable—especially as
other series like
The Office (Reveille Productions, 2005-) continue this trajectory by
selling Dunder Mifflin t-shirts and paper products. Indeed, in 2007, industry analysts
increasingly began to consider the merits of this kind of ‘reverse product placement’,
in which marketers ‘create a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release
it into the real world.’30 Analysts are still unsure of the mass market potential for
reverse product placement, but consider the possibility that it could be most cost
effective to launch a product through fiction than typical advertising and marketing
channels. The Dharma brand may only be used to sell t-shirts and notebooks at the
moments, but the possibility remains that it, and other fictional brands like it, might yet
become greater sources of institutionalized revenue in their own right.
Conclusion
Ultimately,
Lost represents the dissolution of boundaries between diegetic space and
the space of consumption, allowing narrative, promotion, and advertising to overlap.
Mike Benson, ABC’s senior marketing vice president, suggests that the industry look
28
at marketing ‘more like content…If we can take the program, explore the stories and
perpetuate the mystery…and people can share this stuff, it furthers the relationship
with the audience. We’re crafting content, and we work with the sales departments
and integrate them with the original marketing materials.’31 While
Lost heralded a
narrative resurgence on US network television to counter the trend toward reality, it
simultaneously succeeded in integrating the spaces of narrative, marketing, and
everyday reality. On television, fictional institutions like Dharma, Hanso, Widmore,
and so many others serve as the diegetic glue binding together networks of interrelated
characters and actions. But when
Lost diverges as a narrative, moving away from
television and into other media and spaces of everyday life, those institutions begin to
structure more than just the lives of television characters. When fictional institutions
like Dharma or Hanso become part of quotidian existence, quotidian activities can be
subsumed underneath their institutional umbrellas: the actions of audiences and their
movements between different platforms of media experience can now take place
within the hyperdiegetic world. This is not, however, just a curious evolution in
televisual form, but also a significant economic development, as the blurred boundaries
between narrative consumption and the institutionally-positioned experiences of
everyday life make sponsors a part of the story world. Real life corporations that enter
into economic relations with fictional institutions can become a creative part of the
everyday
Lost experience. The Dharma-Hanso complex may not be as real as Jeep,
Monster.com, or Sprite, but its institutional relationships with them and to consumer
life have increasingly become quite real.
29
1 Chad Raphael, ‘The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV,’ in Susan Murray and Laurie
Ouellette, eds.,
Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University
Press, 2004), p. 122.
2 Ted Magder, ‘The End of TV 101: Reality Programmes, Formats, and the New Business of
Television,’in Murray and Ouellette (eds), p. 152.
3 Jennifer L. Pozner, ‘Triumph of the Shill: Reality TV Lets Marketers Write the Script,’
Bitch:
Feminist Response to Pop Culture (Spring 2004): pp. 51-59.
4 Steve McClellan, ‘Idol moments ahead for advertisers: Fox's third rendition is an orgy of
integrated marketing,’
Broadcasting & Cable 134:1 (5 Jan. 2004), p. 20.
5 Matt Roush, ‘Lost & Found! An Original Idea,’
Broadcasting & Cable 134:41 (11 Oct. 2004),
p. 44.
6 John Consoli, ‘Nets to Reduce Repeats,’
Mediaweek 14:21 (24 May 2004), pp. 7-8.
7 Matthew Creamer, ‘Don’t Call It TV: Rebuilding for the Video Age,’
Advertising Age 77:14 (3
Apr. 2006), p. 1.
8 Diane Mermigas, ‘Television Biz Needs Interactive Foresight,’
Hollywood Reporter 390 (13
Sept. 2005), pp. 8, 53.
9 Christopher Anderson,
Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1994), p. 155.
10 Jeffrey Sconce, ‘What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,’ in Lynn Spigel and
Jan Olsson, eds.,
Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), pp. 94-95.
11 Kurt Lancaster,
Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 30.
30
12 Janet H Murray,
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York:
The Free Press, 1997), p. 264. By suggesting viewers can experience events in persona, she
suggests that viewers can themselves be represented by some kind of avatar in the narrative
world.
13 Jason Mittell, ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,’
The Velvet
Light Trap 58:1 (2006), pp. 29-40.
14 Will Brooker, ‘Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence, and
Television Overflow,’
International Journal of Cultural Studies 4:4 (2001):448-455.
15 Murray, p. 254.
16 Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (New York: New
York University Press, 2006), p. 2. See also John Caldwell, ‘Convergence TV: Aggregating
Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration,’ in Spigel and Olsson.
17 Jenkins, pp. 20-21.
18 Matt Hills,
Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 137.
19 Claire Atkinson, ‘Networks Add Alternatives to Traditional On-Air Promos,’
Advertising Age
75:25 (21 June 2004), p. 6.
20 John Consoli, ‘Nets Boost Nontraditional Efforts Despite Higher Cost,’
Adweek 46:35 (12
Sept 2005), p. 7; Jim Finkle, ‘New Shows, New Marketing,’
Broadcasting & Cable 135:8 (21
Feb. 2005), p. 8.
21 A. J Frutkin, ‘Big Networks Differ on Best Use of “Third Screen”,’
Adweek 47:19 (8 May
2006), p. 8; Anne Becker, ‘ABC’s Digital Evangelists,’
Broadcasting & Cable 136:13 (27 March
2006), p. 13.
31
22 Jim Edwards, ‘Time-Shifted Viewing Figures Offer Dramatic Reality Check,’
Brandweek
47:45 (11 Dec. 2006), p. 9.
23 Quoted in Edwards, p. 9.
24 Marc Berman, ‘Dy-No-Mite!,’
Mediaweek 14:41 (15 Nov. 2004), p. 34.
25 Jennifer Armstrong, ‘Love, Labor, Lost,’
Entertainment Weekly 838/839 (9 Sept. 2005), p.
28-33.
26 Kate MacArthur, ‘Bea Perez,’
Advertising Age 77:38 (18 Sept. 2006), p. S4.
27 For more on the concept of ‘collective intelligence’ see Pierre Levy,
Collective Intelligence:
Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1997). For direct
application of Levy’s work to media consumption, see Henry Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences?,’
in Virginia Nightingale and Karen Ross, eds.,
Critical Readings: Media and Audiences
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), pp.279-295. See also Brooker in this volume.
28 Marie-Laure Ryan,
Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature
and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p 304.
29 Claire Atkinson, ‘Getting Creative with Web Games,’
Advertising Age 77:37 (11 Sept. 2006),
p. S4.
30 Todd Wasserman, ‘Forward Thinkers Push Reverse Product Placement,’
Brandweek.com (29
January 2007),
<http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003538681>.
31 Atkinson, p. S4.
