I’ve never before been actually physically angry I can’t be at South by Southwest. This year Oreo teamed up with Twitter and MAYA Design to bring you the “Trending Vending Lounge,” a booth at SXSW that can print you a custom Oreo based on topics trending on Twitter in real time. (Why they didn’t shorten it to the “Trending Machine,” I’ll never know.)
Bonin Bough, vice president of global media for Oreo’s parent company, Mondelez International (please tell me the names Bonin Bough and Mondelez International sound like Bond villainy to you, too) explains:
“We partnered with Twitter and built unique algorithms that prints the cookies based on what’s trending on Twitter in real time. [sic] this is the ability to actually taste culture through an Oreo. We call it ‘eat the tweet’.”
You can surf around hashtags and the machine will choose from twelve different flavors, colors, and creme printing patterns to create one of more than 4,000 different possible combinations. It takes two minutes to print one Oreo, and you can choose whether or not you want the vanilla or the chocolate cookie. Despite filling options that could taste like banana, mint, birthday cake, lime, or a combination of any of those, generally people think they taste the same as regular Oreos.
Bough says the 3D Oreo printer will move around the world, in order to bring people the joy of eating their feelings in an app.
“Oreo itself was trending at one point, so the Oreo printed a cookie of itself, which was very meta, and it tasted like the trend of Oreo.”
It’s like the dorky cousin of the Ferrari Coke machine — not quite as sexy, but the one you end up awkwardly making out with after getting into your mother’s stash of Bartles & Jaymes. It’s sort of like the manic pixie dream girl of internet-designed snack foods.
If you get the chance to check this booth out, Oreo wants you to tweet about it using the hash tag #eatthetweet.
Source: Marketing Magazine