BigShinyThing

First up — CBS in the States is advertising its new schedule on eggs. Yeah, right, whatever, we hear you say — after all Internet bank Smile advertised on bananas yonks ago and we’ve already written about tattooed fruit. But. But this latest effort to merge food and media appears to be well thought out and even has a copy-worthy back story.

The New York Times reports [registration req'd] that network plans to place laser imprints of its insignia and logos for some shows on 35 million eggs in the autumn. CBS’s copywriters have had a load of fun with their sloganeering: CSI — crack the case on CBS; Shark — hard-boiled drama etc.

As cracked as this scheme sounds, George Schweitzer, president of the CBS marketing group, said:

It’s a great way to reach people in an unexpected form… You can’t avoid it.

Just one of the many claimed benefits of the medium is that ‘91% of egg buyers look through eggs to check for breakage prior to purchase’ — more dedicated eyeballs than the average TV commercial can claim (maybe).

The imprinting tech used to brand eggs has been developed by a company called EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Illinois. The founder Bradley Parker claims he wanted to reassure shoppers that egg producers were not placing old eggs in new cartons, so he developed a laser-etching technique to put the expiration date directly on an egg during the washing and grading process. Mr Parker, whose family runs a chicken farm in North Carolina, knew that the only way to get egg producers to co-operate was to make it worth their while. Hence turning the eggs into an advertising medium.

To ensure that egg producers stick to the rules, EggFusion has technicians assigned to each egg plant whilst it owns the equipment and data. The eggs also carry a code that can be checked on a website, www.myfreshegg.com, to find out where the egg originated, the date it left the plant and the names of the distributor and retailer.

Meanwhile in the UK, food producer Birds Eye have continued their ‘we don’t play with your food’ theme into a blog written by one of their pea-farmers. We think that this is a really nice attempt by a corporation to engage with consumers in an open and honest way — right down to somewhat blurry photos. Plus it has a real ‘how it works’ cuteness about it.

What’s clever and zeitgeisty about both of these schemes is that they encourage both consumer trust and producer transparency. The Birds Eye blog has posts titled ‘The folks from ISO are here for an audit’. There is little doubt that consumers Really Care about where the food on their plate comes from nowadays and whether or not it is safe to eat and these branded initatives are picking up on that. And even if the blog in particular is subject to rigorous cross-checking and PR controls it doesn’t show. Plus it’s about peas…

Pea-blogging via Russell Davies’ blog.