GE approached the Bureau with an interesting challenge. The client knew that they wanted to engage their Facebook audience with a campaign that involved the Makerbot, but they needed an idea. The Makerbot is a very interesting place to start — the machine and the technology behind it is amazingly innovation — but it wasn’t enough to simply show the Makerbot “making things.”

The campaign needed a story that was engaging and participatory. GE tapped EVB’s social media and story-telling skills to create a campaign and to give it life on Facebook.

Rather than creating a program where the Makerbot was the star, we allowed the Makerbot to create the stars. In other words, we used the Makerbot, with input from the Facebook audience, to actually create the elements, characters and props that appeared in our stories.

Our initial idea was to use the Makerbot to create a miniature “train town” and allow the Facebook fans to request certain elements be added to the town. We would then create video stories that highlighted each element. GE liked the idea, but encouraged us to tie into an air show that they were sponsoring, so the miniature train town came to life as a miniature air field.

The entire air show was produced in a matter of weeks with the help of a Makerbot expert named Gian Fabio and very resourceful production company called Impact Media. In a matter of days, we crafted a tabletop air field and began to solicit requests from the GE community. Before long, we fielded hundreds of responses and built a number of creative items, including a B1 Bomber, a bi-plane, a DaVinci air ship, a zeppelin and a flying pig.

Each week, the agency would shoot, edit and release video episodes that were built around the content that the Makerbot had created. The campaign become the focal point of the GE Facebook experience for over 4 weeks and the videos continue to engage Makerbot and GE fans alike. Below is a sample of one of the videos that we created.