BelVita Breakfast Biscuits has announced a new contest and 3D printed trophies are among the prizes. Why 3D printed trophies? I have no idea — most likely someone in their marketing department got a list of trending buzzwords. But it speaks volumes of the growing awareness and marketability of 3D printing.
Clearly 3D printing has now become pretty a marketable concept, because BelVita Breakfast Cookies’, I mean Biscuits’, #MorningWin campaign is almost entirely built around it. The whole point is to try and win a 3D printed trophy, and it’s mentioned in such a nonchalant way that you’d think 3D printing was as commonplace as winning a t-shirt. Clearly they’re taking 3D printing seriously and not just exploiting something that’s currently trending on the internet. OK, it’s also really silly, but it’s an ad campaign for a breakfast cookie, I mean biscuit, and if advertising is a fact of life, it should at least be fun. And they’re not presenting it as “wowie, look how futuristic and cutting edge we are” they’re just using a cool accessible technology to sell some cookies.
I successfully wore pants today. In fact, I very successfully wore pants today. #morningwin
— Scott Grunewald (@SJGrunewald) February 11, 2014
The way it works is pretty simple, do something in the morning, like put your pants on without falling over, Tweet about it with the hashtag #MorningWin and through the magic of NSA data-mining — I mean marketing buzzword social listening — BelVita will pick some of the more interesting Tweets, 3D print a trophy depicting you having your successful morning, and ship it to you. You might also get a personalized certificate, a “virtual trophy” or a video made using your Tweet. They’re also apparently housing the whole 3D printed trophy operation in a storefront in New York staffed with several yellow sweater-wearing 3D printer technicians with appropriate facial hair and a half dozen green UpPlus2’s. Go ahead and check out the contest video below.
Beyond selling breakfast cookies, I mean biscuits, it does draw a lot of people to the concept of 3D printing, and I’m sure this is giving a lot of exposure to Up 3D printers so overall this is a good thing. But I do worry that 3D printing could start to be seen as a gimmick by the average consumer if this becomes a trend. While home 3D printing is cool, and I love how accessible and affordable it has become, it isn’t the real game-changing aspect that 3D printing brings to the table. Granted, we can’t expect a purveyor of baked breakfast goods to build an advertising campaign around rapid prototyping or bioprinting. Although mailing out prizes of bioprinted organs on top of a trophy would certainly draw a lot of attention to BelVita’s products. I’ll take a liver, I had a rough weekend.
You should also take a look at their YouTube channel, where they’ve made some follow-up video’s using actual winning tweets. And of course tweet your own morning win!