NEWS: Milk 'Nose' Good Advertising

CULTURE: Milk 'Nose' Good Advertising

You like cookies. If you don't like cookies, there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Bottom line. In fact, you like everything about cookies: you like the way they taste, the crazy number of flavors, the different sizes customized to your cookie needs, and that smell they make when they're baking.

Milk knows this. So in yet another effort to ride Cookie's coattails, Milk is trying out a new advertising technique. Yesterday, with the help of NYC's Arcade Marketing – the creators of "MagniScent" – Milk took the smell of cookies and stuck it to bus stops around San Francisco – because when you want to test out how cool something is, you go where there are copious amounts of gay people.

"Magniscent" are specially designed adhesive strips that, like magazine perfume ads, can replicate scents, in this case with a cookie scent. While you wait for your bus dreaming of warm, gooey cookies, Milk figures your thoughts will turn to Milk, not warm, gooey cookies all by themselves. Goodby SilverStein & Partners masterminded the campaign and according to the "Got Milk?" people, if all goes well in San Francisco, public transportation commuters across the nation might soon find themselves waiting and starving for milk and cookies: A lethal combination of hunger and frustration.

Personally, I hope this plan works. As a resident of New York, I have smelled some amazingly bad smells around the city, and I'm hoping they line the streets with these things. In fact, I am hoping that this cookie strip thing really takes off, and they make pocket versions of these scent strips. That way when you see a near empty train car at rush hour, you won't wonder what's wrong with that train car. You won't squeeze yourself into another completely full train car, pushing vehemently against the passenger in front of you who decided that they were in fact the last rider who should be allowed in.

No, you can just pop out a cookie strip, stick it to your upper lip and ride home in comfort.

Shit, that even rhymes.

Pop out a cookie strip
Stick it to your upper lip
You don't have to smell that shit
Anymore…

Milk, as annoying as the whole "Got Milk?" thing has gotten in the last 13 years, I'm hoping you strike gold with this one.

Does anyone remember that part of Transmetropolitan when spider inhales the advert-pollen stuff and then gets cancer.

anyway, mmmmm, cookies.

you just made me crack up in the office while reading this. i love it...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/05/BAGQDMPQB319.DTL

Got Allergy?

. I actually have a great aversion to eating cookies, mainly because I can't stand anything sweet. At all. But they do smell amazing, so definetly a good idea. This made me laugh for the first time today, thank you.

mmm I love cookies...

is milk really the best thing to be drinking while you're walking around in San Francisco?

Sadly, I heard a thing on NPR the other day talking about this and the expert they had on (dunno where they find smell experts, but oh well) said that they smelled sort of like stale oreos. So... they may be a ways off from reproducing the alluring smell of freshly baked cookies but here's hoping...

Though honestly, I don't like the thought. There's too many other smells that make you hungry for foods. Like the smell of fresh french fries. Or popcorn. Smell's a very powerful tool and it's something that's really not under our control. It's harder to resist a smell than a sight. A sight you can look away from. A smell you can only avoid by moving way downwind of it. Americans in general are fat enough, we don't need to subliminally entice them to gorge themselves on cookies and milk while they wait to go wherever the hell they're going.

Ah, American marketing and advertising. Know you no limits? Now you seek to capitalize on one of our most basic comforts: The smell of baking cookies. You sons of bitches!

Like the exhaust fumes from your typical city bus don't have any detrimental effects to allergy sufferers. What a bunch of no fun hypocrites.

I disagree. I find a lot of the "Got Milk?" ads to be some of the best and funniest ads out there, though they seem to be few and far between (the TV ads, @least) these days.

-TM

so were you saying that there are alot of gay people in san francisco or that there are alot of gay people by bus stops in san fran

Yeah, and why do they loiter around bus stops?

as much as i despise milk and the whole it's-good-for-you marketing bullshit, i have to admit i would have preferred cookies to the pee and fried chicken smells currently hanging around the buses downtown.

Because bus stops are the perfect place to pick up what those in the cookie-business refer to as "rough trade."