Metro New York will begin offering scratch-and-sniff advertisement capabilities to its advertisers this month.
The freestanding inserts featured in the free daily newspaper will give readers the opportunity to sample products such as perfume and flavored foods before purchasing them.
The initiative will begin with the New York edition and will roll over to others, if successful.
The first advertiser to sign on to the program is Glaceau’s Vitamin Water. The company will use the ad as part of its “stay healthy, play hooky” campaign, which features dragon fruit-scented ads to promote the water’s Power-C flavor.
According to a recent Roper Starch study, ads featuring scent sampling are almost three times more likely to be one of the best performing ads for a company.
Metro New York reaches more than 450,000 consumers daily. The publication is distributed Monday through Friday at busy consumer points.
Metro International currently has at least 61 local editions published in 88 major cities in 19 countries and 18 languages across Europe, North and South America, and Asia.
The newspaper has an equal number of female and male readers. Seventy percent of its readers are under the age of 45.
Metro was recently named world’s largest global newspaper by Guinness World Records.
