CAN RADIO COMPETE WITH THIS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 54, 5 July 1940, Page 10

CAN RADIO COMPETE WITH THIS?

Advertising That Smells

OU can listen to radio, and before the war you could look at the artists in your radio set, if you lived in London. The movies started as "lookies" only, and became "talkies." Radio started as a "talkie" only, and was graduating to the "lookie" stage in the years B.H.(*) But neither the cinema nor the radio has yet managed to compete successfully with the latest idea in newspaper advertising. The story comes, of course, from America, where the great newspaperbuying public of the U.S.A. is now smelling its advertisements as well as seeing them. *Before Hitleg

Here Is The News The facts are substantiated by a statement in a recent issue of the English publication "The Advertising World." On November 1, 1939, the " Indianapolis Star" carried a half page advertisement for a brand of perfume, and started something new in daily paper advertising. Over a picture of the perfume’s container appeared the sentence: The illustration in this advertisement is scented with Perfume. Readers duly sniffed, and found that cold print was perfumed for the first time. On December 14, the second scented advertisement appeared in the "Rochester Sun." The advertisement carried the headline: Right on this page of paper we bring you the ACTUAL SCENT of the romantic new

Next came the Oklahoma " Tribune," giving 70,000 readers a whiff of the advertiser’s wares. Finally, to prove that sniffy advertising had come to stay, the "Chicago Daily Tribune" printed the scent of roses into an advertisement reaching a circulation of 1,000,000. _ An Original Idea The " Advertising World" acknowledges that the use of perfume in ink had been developed some years before, but that its application to newspaper advertising was entirely original. The three newspapers mentioned are believed to be the pioneers. It was found when the first experiments were made that the addition of perfume to the ink thinned it down too much. So they thickened the ink and then added the perfume. When the ink was thickened, it was found that the colour had been altered, so an intermedjate process had to be introduced to counteract this. Although the perfume oil could just as easily be added to black ink, there remained the problem of confining the scent in the newspaper to the single advertisement to which it applied. This was overcome by the printers using the perfumed ink in a separate feeder foun-

tain on their presses. To distinguish it further, coloured ink was used. Cost Not Excessive Another difficulty was the fact that the best of perfumes lost their advertising value (to put it politely) after going through the presses. Experiment soon found means of avoiding this however, and it is claimed now that the process has come to stay. Cost had not been found to be excessive. On a run of more than one million papers the Chicago " Tribune" found that the extra cost was not more than £40, When The Listener advertising staff was shown this announcement they asked us to be careful to say that advertising that smells does not find .its way into our columns. "It shtinks". is all they say to that sort of material; but they don’t mean quite the same thing. Perhaps some day we may do without a poster and rely on customers’ noses for our sales. Meanwhile, if you sniff, you will smell only ink and paper, and the NBS engineers assure us that no wavelength at present in use will put perfume through your loudspeaker. But these days, of course, anything might happen.