Online advertising is the holy grail for news organizations looking to replace all that revenue they've lost from classified subscriptions and print advertising, but there’s one thing you can do with a print ad that you will never be able to do with an online popup – eat it. That's right, a New Jersey marketing company, US Ink, has begun inserting paper strips called Taste 'n Save Sticky Notes into print advertisements for food products. Todd Wheeler is marketing manager for US Ink, and he says that putting that strip in your mouth is the next best thing to eating the food itself.
TODD WHEELER: They use an edible film very similar to the ubiquitous Listerine strip, and what they're able to do is replicate the taste of any food or beverage. It’s never been offered before where you have taste sampling for an advertising experience to a mass market.
BOB GARFIELD: You mean taste sampling like in the supermarket where the lady stops you and gives you some sort of cheese puff.
TODD WHEELER: That's right. Using that method can be somewhat costly and, you know, for a given store you may interface with 200, 300 people per store per day. By using the newspaper mass media you’re able to hit tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in one day. You know, it's interesting, a lot of times we hear about the death of newspapers, but more than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day. That’s, that’s more than watch the Super Bowl.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so we're talking about publishing and food strip technology but, of course, the first thing that jumps to my mind is the painting by Magritte of a pipe, and the painting, I think, is titled, This is Not a Pipe, This is a Picture of a Pipe. When you have a flavor strip that tastes like a can of stewed tomatoes but is really just a flavor strip of a can of stewed tomatoes, isn't that almost false advertising?
TODD WHEELER: Not really. Let me explain by giving you a real life example. First Flavor worked with Welch’s, and they did an ad in People Magazine. After the ad ran and they used the Peel ‘n Taste technology, they found out that 29 percent of the readers of the magazine actually tried the flavor strip, which roughly translates to 1.5 million consumers sampling the taste of Welch’s. Perhaps more importantly, 59 percent of the flavor strip tryers were more likely to purchase the Welch’s brand of grape juice.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, final question: Is there any nutritional content to the strips, and then, b) could a newspaper actually double as a meal?
TODD WHEELER: [LAUGHS] The - the flavor strips have zero calories and, again, the ingredients are all FDA approved.
[LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Todd, thank you so very much.
TODD WHEELER: Bob, thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Todd Wheeler is marketing manager of US Ink. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
