The smell of good advertising
Whiff of Mccain spuds at U.K. bus shelters is all dollars and scents
The smell of potatoes baking is the secret ingredient in a new Mccain Food campaign that has just launched across Britain.
At 10 bus shelters from London to Glasgow, commuters can press a button on a bulging 3-D baked potato and get a whiff of a custom Mccain scent.
“This is their biggest launch since oven chips (fries) in 1979,” an advertising spokeswoman told the Toronto Star.
“The idea is to bring the whole feeling, the smell and comforting warmth” of baked potatoes straight to potential consumers.
In a marketing first, the fibreglass potato also warms up and dispenses a discount coupon.
The $2.2 million campaign from the British arm of the New Brunswick frozen foods giant is promoting Mccain Ready Baked Jackets, which are microwaveable prebaked potatoes.
While engaging the nose, eyes and ears dates back to Victorian times in advertising, modern chemistry has given it a new clout — and new controversies.
Halifax, for example, has declared itself a fragrance-free city. A number of Canadian schools and hospitals also have scent-free policies. A 2006 milk campaign in San Francisco curdled when city bus shelter ads wafted the scent of chocolate chip cookies. Citizens complained of olfactory pollution and subliminal encouragement of obesity. The ads lasted one day. Scent marketing industry pioneer Harald Vogt has called Singapore Airlines the “poster child of multi- sensory marketing” by introducing a branded scent more than 15 years ago. His Scent Marketing Institute awarded Abercrombie & Fitch its marketer of the year award in December for using its branded fragrance Fierce to scent its stores. Dozens of companies provide scent advertising now to hundreds of companies. Scentandrea of Santa Barbara, Calif., pumps out the scent of fresh coffee at self-service gas pumps, among its many campaigns. “One container of coffee is more profitable than 10 gallons of gas,” Scentandrea founder Carmine Santandrea told the Star. Scent advertising “is a tool that appeals to the emotions. Smell represents 75 per cent of what you taste. We want to reach one nose at a time.” Scentandrea’s client list includes “more than half of the Fortune 500 companies,” he said. Nivea tried out the scent of its sunscreen on the audience at the end of a 60-second beach commercial in German movie theatres in 2008, Salon magazine reported. “Audience recall of the smelly ad was 500 per cent higher than for the scent-free version,” Salon reported.