Is there any way that advertisers can come up with anything new to bombard us with? They certainly have exhausted every avenue possible in exploiting existing mediums from 16-wheeler billboards to virtual ads in the social networking game, Second Life. Is there no end to what advertisers can exploit? Apparently not, because the new game seems to be your sense of smell.

In an article in the May, ‘07, Wired magazine, Sissel Tolaas, a Berlin chemist, is working on capturing scents in ways never thought of before. She is piggybacking onto the industrial microencapsulation process — otherwise known as “scratch-and-sniff” — in order to take this technology to the next level of commercialization. She has traveled all over the world collecting odors in which she has built a library of 6,763 scents, ranging from flowers, to dirt, to rotten bananas.

Today, Tolaas’s work and reputation has led her to the perfume industry in which her lab is funded by International Flavors and Fragrances, a $4 billion company that makes perfumes for Prada and Calvin Klein. Now she is looking at untapped markets by collaborating with companies such as IKEA and Volvo in which she is developing scents that will be associated with a “brand”. So in the future, we may not only know a company by its logo (visual), or its jingle (auditory), we may now know it by its scent (olfactory). As you probably know, the goal of advertising is to incorporate as many senses as possible in order to excite the consumer about a product. So, viola, a new industry is cropping up and advertisers are there to exploit it.




But that’s not all, Tolaas is also working with using the industrial microencapsulation process to create special paint. This concept can be used in any setting where paint is applied, such as a room in which once visitors touch the walls, it would break tiny microscopic capsules which in turn would release a specific scent into the air.

I find it a little concerning that we will we not be able to escape advertising anywhere we look or escape hearing jingles anywhere we are, now we won’t be able to escape pervasive scents. It just goes to show you how invasive advertising is becoming every day. My question is when will our sensory systems overload from all the stimulation? Maybe we will end up like the bees whose navigation systems get hijacked by cell phone radiation, and not be able to find our way home due to our own sensory overload. You’ve got to wonder what this really contributes to society. Personally, I don’t think we will be around long enough to figure this out. So, we’ll just go on bombarding our bodies and our minds with mindless stimuli whose sole purpose is to just buy more stuff.