Creativity Online reports that to promote its new product Ready Baked Jackets, McCain Foods is tempting UK consumers with the wafting smell of '3D baked potatoes' as they wait at city bus shelters in York, Manchester, London, Nottingham and Glasgow. Already the advertising term 'Smell-vertising' Technology has been coined to describe this development - jargon that is worse than the potato itself.
I am not sure that I would necessarily want to smell baked potato at a bus shop but it would at least be a change from the other smells one associates with a tightly packed mass of humanity waiting to catch the Number 10 to Russell Square or some other location.
The potato poster works by having a hidden heating element that warms the fiberglass 3D potato when you press a button. It then releases the aroma of oven-baked jacket potato throughout the bus shelter. The smell in question was developed in collaboration with a specialist scent lab over a period of three months.
Press my jacket takes on a whole new meaning!
Those of us who have lived in Singapore know full well that the heat of the day can be oppressive and seeking cool respite in a underground subway concourse is one way to beat the heat.
Paypal has seen an opportunity to try out its “Shop and Pay On-the-Go” Pilot in the MRT's. According to their blog, they have doubled theirr mobile predictions for 2012 to $7 billion are a trialing a system that enables Singaporean commuters to shop and pay on-the-go.
The pilot is now live across 15 subway stations island-wide. Commuters choose an exclusive deal by scanning a QR code on a billboard or poster using their smartphone, then pay with PayPal in as little as two clicks.
Making use of a digital wallet is not a new experience in a society that has used smart cards on transport and for retailing over many years.Singaporeans are very techno-savvy.
Smartphone penetration reached 70% in the country last year, and a recent study Paypal conducted revealed that nearly 7 out of 10 Singaporeans were likely to make a transaction on their mobile phone.
Paypal believes that the beauty of its mobile transaction is that no additional infrastructure is required for merchants, retailers and consumers. Their study also revealed that nearly two thirds of mobile shoppers had previously stopped a mobile transaction in the past because of the hassle of entering financial details on a small screen.
They have go around this problem by using scan and click QRCodes. Shopping on the go has never been easier.
