Would You Recognize the Smell of McDonald’s Fries Anywhere?
The chain wanted to see if it could advertise with scent alone.
Photo courtesy of McDonald's
The scent of McDonald’s French fries is unmistakable. When you smell it, you immediately recognize it. Close your eyes and think about getting into a friend’s car after they’ve picked up takeout from the Golden Arches. Yeah — that smell.
It was with that fact in mind that McDonald’s Netherlands launched a new campaign, “Smells Like McDonald’s.” As part of the campaign, the brand positioned billboards with nothing on them but a full span of either red or yellow — yes, McDonald’s trademark colors, but no images, no words, not even a logo — around the Dutch cities of Utrecht and Leiden.
The billboards did offer one big clue as to why they were there, though: the wafting scent of McDonald’s fries.
The pull off the stunt, the brand put some packets of McDonald’s fries in a secret compartment of the billboards, which it placed near locations of the fast-food chain. Then it used heat and ventilation to disperse the smell and direct it at pedestrians strolling by.
“People could look away, but they couldn’t smell away,” the brand says in a YouTube video.
Judging from the video, a lot of those people quickly figured out what they were sniffing. Sample responses:
“I smell fries.”
“It smells like a Happy Meal.”
“The French fries of McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s hasn’t said whether it plans to deploy the billboards elsewhere, but McDonald’s Netherlands Chief Marketing Officer Stijn Mentrop-Huliselan commented on the success of what the brand has trumpeted as “the world’s first billboard that smells like McDonald’s.”
“Smell has been proven to be more effective at sparking clear and emotional memories than images,” Mentrop-Huliselan says in a statement. “With the inclusion of this next sense in our advertising, we found a new way to remind people of good times at McDonald’s.”
Now if they can pull off the same trick with a shake, we’ll be really impressed …
Related Content:
