Scented online banner revealed

In order to market Brazil's best-selling men's fragrance Kaiak, a local ad agency came up with an interactive scheme that had potential customers trying it out through scented banners that appeared while they were browsing the web.

The agency, called BlackMamba, installed ads on top of the browser service homepages of 15 internet cafés across the country, which read: "The best selling men's fragrance in the country just changed. Want to try it? Click this banner. IT'S SCENTED."

When visitors clicked through, a cardboard banner containing a peel-off fragrance area was "printed" - in fact, released - with the help of specially designed hardware installed in the sides of the computer monitors.

Watch a demonstration of the project here: http://vimeo.com/11880708.

Why such an elaborate campaign for a product that's already so successful? Kaiak is exclusively sold via door-to-door representatives (much like Avon in the US, for instance) and wanted to communicate that its fragrance had changed. Plus: internet cafés seemed like the right place to market the scent, given its cheap and accessible nature (and 77 percent of all visitors in Brazil are male, according to BlackMamba).

The result of the campaign: the click-through rate was 43 times higher than the global average, and 10,000 banners were distributed in just one weekend.