Perfume Puts Ad Industry in Bad Odor

We are all creatures of advertising. It tells us how to dress, what to eat, what to drink, what to drive; it promises to make us beautiful, to lend us thousands of dollars no matter how bad our credit, to grow hair, to make us smell good.

More than any previous generation in history we are consumers. What we buy is more important than how we vote. Even as we drive over our freeways in our cars, we are bombarded by buoyant messages telling us what to read, where to eat, how to invest, where to go to have our noses bobbed, and how to ease the pain of hemorrhoids, arthritis, backache and various of the other ills that urban man is heir to.

We are so dependent on advertising that I wonder whether we could go on functioning as civilized human beings if it were suddenly withdrawn. Could we cope in a world that did not constantly flash messages to us, telling us how to live, how to attract the opposite sex, how to grow rich, how to succeed in business without really trying?

How addicted we are to advertising and its insidious effects is evident in an article from the London Daily Telegraph sent to me by Marion A. Elliott of Laguna Hills.

It is about the public response to a new Australian perfume called Sheila. It was introduced by 4,500 posters placed on bus shelters throughout London. Like most perfume ads it was seductive, creating an aura of sex and mystery, but one particular ad was different from the genre. Across the bottom was the line: ALSO KILLS FLIES.

The response was sensational. Retailers throughout London were harried by customers demanding Sheila. It became the talk of the town.

Alas, there was no such product. Francis Goodwin, marketing director of More O’Ferrell, the company that designed and distributed the poster, said that Sheila was a spoof. The poster was meant to test public reaction to advertising under certain conditions of lighting and location.

The line ALSO KILLS FLIES, Goodwin sheepishly explained, was intended to serve as a tip-off to the public that the ad was a fake; that there was no such perfume on the market.

The results were at once embarrassing and encouraging. More O’Ferrell found out that the public would indeed respond to its advertising methods, but it also found itself out on a limb, with a successful advertising campaign for a product that did not exist.

Surely, though, the manufacturing and advertising industries can extract some profitable lessons from this fiasco. Doesn’t it prove that the public is eager to pay for products that combine ideal as well as practical results? Surely a product that would make a woman more sexually alluring and at the same kill flies would have a universal appeal. It goes one step beyond the old advertising slogan: “Make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

What troubles me, though, is that the public was so easily taken in by what the company thought was an obvious hoax. A public so gullible that it could not detect the comic incongruity of this product’s claims is also a public that could be easily taken in by the demagoguery of Big Brother.

The article revealed that several years ago an Australian company did market a perfume called Sheila in Britain, but it “faded like a vanishing perfume.” As a result of the recent reaction, however, the company may begin to manufacture and market the perfume again. Whether it will be advertised as also killing flies, the article did not say.

This was not the first time More O’Ferrell spoofed the public. Five years ago it tried a poster-evaluating campaign featuring a small girl saying, “I like slugs and snails.” There was never any explanation.

It was also recalled that in France last year an advertising company launched a poster campaign in which a young woman appeared in a bikini, saying she would remove her top in 10 days. As was expected, crowds were assembled around each of the poster sites on the 10th day. As promised, in new posters the woman’s top had been removed. But her back was to the public.

All the same, it would be convenient to have a perfume that attracted men and at the same time killed flies.