How would the governments of our planet prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world?

They wouldn’t.

The IHC will.

Luckily for all six billion of us, these words are part of a viral ad campaign for Sony’s 2012 — an epic disaster movie from the creators of Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow (a mighty trinity of modern disaster movies). Trigger’s banners bring life to and legitimize Sony’s alternate reality campaign — blurring the line between reality and movie reality.

Trigger’s banners invite people to visit Sony’s ARG site and sign up for — wait for it — a “survival lottery.” Organized by the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC), the site seeks to give every human a chance at surviving the imminent disaster of 2012. Some people are hand picked by the IHC, and the rest must go through the lottery. (And you thought the release of the last Spider-Man trailer brought the Interwebs to a crawl.)

Our banners ran on MySpace, IGN, UGO, and Crave Online, and the media buys included two prominent spaces (a 728×90 and 300×250 or 300×600 ad) on each site. (Sony created the IHC Site they point to.)

The imagery of the ads is intended to personalize the IHC; painting it as a professional, scientific, and creepily powerful entity with a true concern for humanity. The IHC believes a huge cataclysmic force will destroy Earth in 2012 and that it is their duty to prepare for humanity’s survival. Each Flash ad is alive with a mosaic that rotates images of everyday people. On each target site, the slots were synchronized to achieve the desired effect of timing and alternation of messaging and images.

See more stills from the banners in the gallery below. And if you have a second you might want to sign up for the lottery as well!