Electronic Ad Delivers Fun and a New Car Smell for Toyota
Toyota has produced one of the most innovative, interactive magazine inserts ever to promote the new Camry.
Its agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, got together with Structural Graphics and together they threw every notion of caution to the wind.
The result is a tri-fold magazine insert that includes “really skinny” wires, sensors, a visual display, LED lights, four PC boards and perhaps one of the most powerful drivers of a sale—the scent of a new car. The ad is entertaining InStyle magazine readers (50,000 U.S. subscribers) through the March issue.
Readers can grab “door handles” to open the ad and then press on sensors that will measure their pulse rate as they watch the dashboard light up and inhale the scent. The ad features the 2018 Camry as part of a broader campaign that began in September and includes broadcast and digital media.
While new technologies and wild thinking drive new innovative marketing like the Camry ad, there are still components from way back when that also continue to play important roles, like scent marketing.
Scent marketing, estimated to be a $200 million industry, has been around for decades and continues to be used by marketers to sell everything from whiskey to fried chicken to baby products.
For example, last month, KFC gave away fried chicken-scented cards for Valentine’s Day to promote its two-person Chicken Share meal. The limited-edition cards carried cheeky messages like, “You have the secret recipe to my heart.” And a few years ago Oscar Mayer came up with a zany “Bacon Scent Alarm Clock” app that not only wakes you up, it sends a puff of freshly cooked bacon scent into the air to encourage you to jump out of bed and fire up a pan of sizzling bacon.
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