MMMM # 105 - Advertising

     I make a living because of advertising these days, but I've been a student of the art since I first started my career in Broadcasting.
     I know that each word in an ad, in print or on-air, is there because some copywriter created it. And sometimes I find myself wondering...how did this ever make it through the advertising editorial process??
     Old Spice has gotten a huge amount of free publicity from the "Old Spice Guy" online videos, including the new series in which he responds to customer questions.

     But that's not the Old Spice ad I'm talking about. The one I've got on my mind is the tag line for one of their deodorant products. This product, advertised on a coupon in this morning's paper; 

"Inhale The Adventure"

     Inhale the adventure? Huh? Perhaps I'm just naive, but isn't the only purpose of deodorant to cover up our stink? Are we supposed to go up to people and sniff their pits?

     The boy's school I attended in the 60's could have been a testing lab for Right Guard spray. It seemed to me that every student used it, and sprayed it ad naseum around the dorm. To this day I won't go near that product for fear of bad memories bubbling up.

     I interviewed an author back in the day who claimed in his book that the sole purpose of all of our "aroma" consumer products was to block the smell sensors in our nose, making it impossible for us to smell whatever was being covered up...and pretty much everything else too.

     I do know that scents can be powerful memory triggers. Once I was sitting at a desk in Vietnam when I was startled to smell the aroma of the pipe tobacco my Father smoked, and i looked up, fully expecting to see him there, thousands of miles away from his home. He wasn't, of course, it was just a visiting pipe smoker with the same tobacco.

     In 1986, National Geographic enclosed a scratch and sniff aroma test in 11-Million magazines. The biggest test of the sense of smell ever.

     The most recent book about the subject is "What The Nose Knows".,a volume published in 2008 that I have not read, but I did watch some interviews with the author.

     Maybe he knows what it means to inhale the adventure?