All hail ‘The Oscar Mayer Institute for the Advancement of Bacon‘. Oscar Mayer partnered with Scentee and brought in 360i and Olson Engage to create an innovative integrated marketing campaign scentered around the delicious aroma of freshly cooked bacon. It’s gone viral fast.
The Wake Up and Smell the Bacon app is downloaded. A dongle containing the bacon scent is plugged into the headphone jack of an iPhone and when the pre-set alarm goes off it activates the bacon odor pack and fills one’s bedroom and early morning dreams with the smell of delicious bacon.
That sounds good enough to us.
But those clever Mayer marketers have thrown the lure of FOMO into the mix. Only a few thousand of the bacon dongles have been created. In order to score one you have to visit wakeupandsmellthebacon.com, watch a pretty wild video, enter your details and a competition – and if you’re one of the lucky winners a bacon awakening could be in your future.
Which leads us to wonder, where else could the power of smell be integrated into online marketing campaigns. Well it’s clear that perfume samples have found their new digital home. The scent of a spice market emanating from a travel ad? The aroma of the latest coffee blend steaming out of the Starbucks website? And just imagine the range of smells that one could use to enhance the traditional storytelling experience – ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’ anyone?
It’s going to be fascinating to see how the technology evolves. And where marketers and storytellers take it. We’re really looking forward to playing in this space. But first off let’s do lunch, all this talk of bacon has left our bellies growling…
The Wonderblog 