G&T-scented pages for IPC weekly titles

IPC’s TV Times and other weekly titles could soon be smelling of cooked bacon, strawberries, gin and tonic or coffee as a result of new printing technology.

Mass-market titles will be able to carry what are being billed as “smelly pages” for the first time, where readers peel back a sticker and release the smell of a particular product.

Scented pages were previously restricted to smaller circulation monthlies because the cost of manually inserting the page was prohibitively expensive. The swifter turnaround time for mass-market weeklies also made hand insertion impractical.

IPC believes that the scented paper will add a new dimension to advertising and will also create a strong point of difference to other publications.

Sue Nuttall, senior sales executive at IPC says: “There are so many applications for this, from cooked bacon to chocolate, coffee, shampoo and conditioners, biscuits or even gin and tonic. It’s a new angle for advertisers.”

After testing the technology for TV Times, IPC is hoping to roll the idea out to mass-market titles, including TV Times and What’s On TV, as well as Woman, Woman’s Weekly or Woman’s Own.

Nuttall also believes that the ability to create scents such as gin and tonic could attract those advertisers who do not traditionally use the weeklies.