They say smell is one of our strongest senses and is most closely tied to our memories and emotions. Walking by a bakery pulling out a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies can conjure up a whole host of mental snapshots. Now, turn that bakery into a digital billboard for, say, a “famous” cookie company, and you have the type of thing marketers’ dreams are made of.
Think this possibility lives in the distant future? Think again. According to mediaplannerbuyer.com, Tokyo-based NTT Communications began testing this technology yesterday in front of Kirin City Beer Hall in Tokyo’s Yaesu Shopping Mall. The aroma-enhanced digital signage (called Kaoru Digital Signage) will be in place through December and will emit lemon and orange scents (typically associated with beer). The company hopes to gauge the sign’s effectiveness in attracting the attention of mall shoppers.
It will be interesting to see the impact this technology has both on results and general popular opinion. If it takes off, just think of all the possibilities here in the States…and you thought walking through a department store perfume section was rough…
2 responses
Jim Cropcho // Oct 22, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Crazy! On the bike ride to work this morning (Mon) I was thinking about smell graffiti! I guess we’re on the same page here.
David Levine // Oct 30, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I think that your site is very interesting - I was contacted by Rich Martin today. My company is the first rights patent holder to a form of retrofittable wireless vending machine advertising. We work with a company called Cantaloupe Systems to get a real time vend/impression count at the location. Our device has also been proven to increase sales at the machine level and entertain customers (we can pull sports and news RSS feeds onto our signs as well.) We do not want to limit ourselves to vending related advertising, and so I have been through the traditional sales channels and it seems like they do not work as well for non traditional out of home media. Experimental media needs a new way of marketing, and your site seems like the most fully developed marketplace of this type I have seen. I actually thought that I would need to create something like this to sell my product and I was dreading it. It seems that you have done what I did not want to do, allowing me to focus on developing my product. Marketplaces like yours will encourage media such as mine to be developed, and it will put much needed pressure on traditional ad agencies to change the way they do business.
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