Sergey and Larry Hit the Panic Button

.‘Wall Street Journal’ to Offer ‘Rub ‘n Sniff’ Ads

That is the headline, and I am not making it up. Just in case you don’t believe I’m not making it up, I’ll quote the article itself:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — And you thought the Small Street Journal was a new experience. The Wall Street Journal is on the verge of offering scented print-ad units that will appear on the regular pages of the paper. The technology takes “scratch ‘n sniff” to a more refined level — think “rub and sniff.” That was in yesterday’s online version of Advertising Age, and in case you are wondering, as I did at first, if this is a hoax by The Onion, it actually quotes not one of The Onion’s regular “American Voices,” but the publisher of the Wall Street Journal itself:

“You actually have to rub some part of the ad,” said L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher, The Wall Street Journal. “This won’t be like the early days of magazine ads, where you picked it up and felt like you were walking through Bloomingdale’s and spritzing you.” I hear from sources in Mountain View that Larry Page and Sergey Brin pulled an all-hands-on-deck all-nighter in the Googleplex last night to try to come up with a response to this latest salvo from the sinking ship otherwise known as the newspaper industry, which appears eager to capitalize on the raging success of its most recent killer idea, the smaller-sized newspaper.

Word has it that after racking their brains over pizza and Red Bull, the only response Larry and Sergey could come up with was,“Is this a hoax by The Onion?”

Jeff Matthews I Am Not Making This Up

© 2007 Jeff Matthews

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