Dec 05

I say cookie you say…?

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The last big controversial ad campaign I remember is Benetton’s “We, On Death Row” series, which featured death row convicts awaiting their fate. To make matters worse, these larger-than-life posters were displayed in the towns in which the convicts committed their heinous crime. Now, apparently the next worst thing has just come out: cookie smelling ads in bus shelters in San Francisco. To sell what you ask? Not cookies, no, but milk. Cold, refreshing milk.

Check out the details in The San Francisco Chronicler

The uproar is quite fantastic, you see. Complaints are being thrown about from all aspects – chemical sensitivities, asthmatics, dieters – that make me wonder if the PR firm handling this campaign could have ever seen this coming.

Of course one key messages includes ideas that this product isn’t harmful, instead it actually comes from food-product flavouring. Unfortunately, they didn’t reveal what these ingredients actually are (or why they can’t reveal them).

I wonder, if like the Benetton ads, the California Milk Processor Board will feel obliged to stop the campaign. No one really likes to be the bad-guy. I guess enough bad press can persuade someone to do just about anything. Isn’t that good to know?

  • soultana
    marketing is a dirty business
    they will use anything to get people to do what they want them to
    on the light side of things better smell like cookies then .......some other nasty odors
  • John The Siskos Kid
    Better to have bus shelters smelling like cookies than homeless people.

    That said, I wouldn't be surprised to drive by a bus shelter and see a dwelling-challenged person licking the poster hoping for a sweet taste of chocolate chip or maybe oatmeal raisin.
  • Hey hey hey,

    come to FRANCE to see what we do with our bus shelters
    and if you speak french you can understand that smell doesn't do anything to change our comportement !

    ;)

    http://nouchema.blog.lemonde.fr/2006/12/05/du-bruit-apres-les-odeurs

  • Alan
    ...I say...Twinky?... That is to say thank god its not twinky's they were using in there smelly adds, some years ago I remember a story where somewhere in the good ol' U.S. of A, a killer got off after a pleed of insanity claiming eating twinky's made him do it. Apparently the all too famous creamy filling triggered a very unpleasent mood in the man. So the idea of these new adds sounds pretty smart. Hopefully obesity is all there will be to worry about, and the smell of cookies doesn't get someone killed. I gotta say I do feel for the homeless just a little bit on this one.
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