Trendsurfing: Edible adverts (The Times)
By David Rowan
You have to admire those marketers for sheer persistence. Show them any surface not already plastered in advertisements, and they'll spot an unbeatable, one-time-only, can't-afford-to-miss business opportunity. You may have considered our visual environment already cluttered enough with ads covering urinals, human foreheads, beach sand, car-park barriers, café table-tops and the bottom of the holes on upmarket golf courses. But now, folks, they're coming for your food. The latest idea making ad-land salivate involves putting clients' money ... well, wherever your mouth is.
Advertising on food is not an entirely new idea. Businesses have long promoted themselves using logos running through sticks of rock, or by squeezing corporate slogans into fortune cookies. But some clever new technologies have lately emerged to make it easy and cheap to customise everyday food items with edible sales pitches. And that is causing the marketing whizzes to lick their lips.
Take the humble egg, formerly understood as a temporary shelter for embryonic chicks, or, at its most edgy, an ingredient for one of Nigella's pistachio soufflés. That was before a marketing-services company called EggFusion redefined it as "a media vehicle" for what it describes without irony as the fast-growing discipline of "on-egg messaging". They'll laser-etch your slogan just above the use-by date, and all of a sudden you have the "reach, impressions and flexibility" that namby-pamby media like TV just can't compete with.
These chaps are pretty serious, proclaiming their vision for "all eggs everywhere" eventually to carry corporate imprints. "Consumers actually hold your message in their hand," their sales patter explains - an "intimacy" that radio ads would scramble to keep up with. Want to reach "middle-class mothers, typically the family decision-maker ... before the shopping day begins"? Egg-ads will hit her first thing in the morning.
The Institute of Food Technologists, those visionary types who foretold humanity's need for irradiated pizza and freeze-dried ice-cream, has declared "digital food imaging", as the discipline is more widely known, as one of its trends to watch in 2006. What particularly impressed the techies were the multi-coloured edible adverts that Procter & Gamble has been printing on to its Pringles crisps, promoting Trivial Pursuits games and the Guinness World Records books using edible inks. Launched across the United States last May, Pringles Prints are individually sprayed during manufacture with up to four colours using a "revolutionary technology". The ink is "kosher-certified", too, so that keeps the ethnic market happy.
The idea is catching hold. An Australian entrepreneur has announced a food-printing system that can place your message on to doughnuts, breads and biscuits. An American promotions company will screen-print 1,000 of your company's logos on to walnut shells for $269. Gourmet Impressions, in New York, will sell you tools to emboss pizzas and melons so that they become "edible experiences".
The trend has not been universally welcomed in the marketing community. Arguments have been raging on ad-world blogs this month over whether egg ads will simply frustrate consumers by intruding on their private spaces. But when there's clutter to be overcome, you can bet that ethical considerations will not constrain the account planners too much. Why, if these ads didn't stand out from all the noise, Trendsurfing wouldn't be writing about them.
And after food? Look out for the Flower Art Colour Painter, recently developed in China. Invest in the £750 unit, and you can "directly paint characters or pictures on petals, thus enlivening ordinary flowers". Just think of all those spring meadows crying out to be branded.
(The Times Magazine, February 18 2006)
You have to admire those marketers for sheer persistence. Show them any surface not already plastered in advertisements, and they'll spot an unbeatable, one-time-only, can't-afford-to-miss business opportunity. You may have considered our visual environment already cluttered enough with ads covering urinals, human foreheads, beach sand, car-park barriers, café table-tops and the bottom of the holes on upmarket golf courses. But now, folks, they're coming for your food. The latest idea making ad-land salivate involves putting clients' money ... well, wherever your mouth is.
Advertising on food is not an entirely new idea. Businesses have long promoted themselves using logos running through sticks of rock, or by squeezing corporate slogans into fortune cookies. But some clever new technologies have lately emerged to make it easy and cheap to customise everyday food items with edible sales pitches. And that is causing the marketing whizzes to lick their lips.
Take the humble egg, formerly understood as a temporary shelter for embryonic chicks, or, at its most edgy, an ingredient for one of Nigella's pistachio soufflés. That was before a marketing-services company called EggFusion redefined it as "a media vehicle" for what it describes without irony as the fast-growing discipline of "on-egg messaging". They'll laser-etch your slogan just above the use-by date, and all of a sudden you have the "reach, impressions and flexibility" that namby-pamby media like TV just can't compete with.
These chaps are pretty serious, proclaiming their vision for "all eggs everywhere" eventually to carry corporate imprints. "Consumers actually hold your message in their hand," their sales patter explains - an "intimacy" that radio ads would scramble to keep up with. Want to reach "middle-class mothers, typically the family decision-maker ... before the shopping day begins"? Egg-ads will hit her first thing in the morning.
The Institute of Food Technologists, those visionary types who foretold humanity's need for irradiated pizza and freeze-dried ice-cream, has declared "digital food imaging", as the discipline is more widely known, as one of its trends to watch in 2006. What particularly impressed the techies were the multi-coloured edible adverts that Procter & Gamble has been printing on to its Pringles crisps, promoting Trivial Pursuits games and the Guinness World Records books using edible inks. Launched across the United States last May, Pringles Prints are individually sprayed during manufacture with up to four colours using a "revolutionary technology". The ink is "kosher-certified", too, so that keeps the ethnic market happy.
The idea is catching hold. An Australian entrepreneur has announced a food-printing system that can place your message on to doughnuts, breads and biscuits. An American promotions company will screen-print 1,000 of your company's logos on to walnut shells for $269. Gourmet Impressions, in New York, will sell you tools to emboss pizzas and melons so that they become "edible experiences".
The trend has not been universally welcomed in the marketing community. Arguments have been raging on ad-world blogs this month over whether egg ads will simply frustrate consumers by intruding on their private spaces. But when there's clutter to be overcome, you can bet that ethical considerations will not constrain the account planners too much. Why, if these ads didn't stand out from all the noise, Trendsurfing wouldn't be writing about them.
And after food? Look out for the Flower Art Colour Painter, recently developed in China. Invest in the £750 unit, and you can "directly paint characters or pictures on petals, thus enlivening ordinary flowers". Just think of all those spring meadows crying out to be branded.
(The Times Magazine, February 18 2006)
<< Home