The Kitchen Table

Why Bus Shelters Smell Like They Do

Howard Gossage, the cult-famous, mischief-addicted San Francisco copywriter, hated outdoor advertising.

The grounds for his hatred were simple. Unlike some other forms of the art, it was, he said, “involuntary.” You couldn’t avoid it, turn it off, mute it, skip over it, shorten it, or, for that matter, TIVO or spam-filter it. It was there, for 90 seconds of your commute or 120 seconds of your walk or 100 percent of your view of Manhattan, and there was nothing you could do about it. It was like bad architecture. Howard wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

While I agree with a lot of the things Gossage said and did, I can’t say I’d go along with this one. I have a Warholian approach to outdoor: make it public, talked about, outrageous, challenging, beautiful, resented, and it will become an event. Done right, it can be a big splashing riot of commercialism, a cherry bomb in the city’s mailbox.

I talked big. Until sometime last November.

One of our writers, Thomas Kemeny, came to me with a really intriguing idea for the “got milk?” campaign. What if we made bus shelters that smelled like bakery goods with the campaign logo inside? Would the aroma remind us of how good a glass of milk is with, say, vanilla or chocolate chip cookies?

“Can you do that?” I asked. “How would you do it? Like, with blowers or what?”

“We don’t know,” he said.

I kind of knew that would be the answer. I told him that before we went any further, we had to find out.

He came back a few days later. “We can do it,” he said. “They have these scent strips, like the things you use in scratch-and-sniff ads, but much bigger. We can install the strips around the perimeter of the bus shelter. The company’s coming over to show us.”

Sure enough, there were not only great-smelling scent strips, but they also came in all kinds of flavors: several scents of chocolate chip, vanilla, ginger snaps, oatmeal raisin. I carried one of the strips home and tried it out on my always-ready children. They liked it. We brought the idea to Steve James, the chairman of the California Milk Processors.

“Can you do that?” he asked. “How would you do it?”
We smiled condescendingly. A couple of meetings later, we were on our way.

We decided to test the things out in a handful of shelters—just five in San Francisco. It seemed like this was a fairly innovative sort of thing, so we mentioned it to the “got milk?” public relations people at RLPR.

A couple of days before the first installation, I got a call from Molly Ireland at RLPR.
“We’ve got NPR national, all three networks and CNN coming over for it,” she said.

“For the opening of a bus shelter?” I asked.

Indeed, on the day, it was about as packed as a single city block could get. Antennae poked and prodded the sky. Boom mikes swung every which way. A reporter from a local radio news station asked me how I thought San Francisco would receive the idea.

To tell the truth, I hadn’t really thought about it. “Who knows?” I blurted out. “It could spark a nostalgic return to home-baked cookies and cozy cocooning. Or it could be seen as a nefarious intrusion that threatens life as we know it. It’s San Francisco. You never know.”

As I spoke, I watched as a handful of bus patrons waited inside the shelter, cornered by the media. They universally smiled and deemed it all a big success. I decided everything was going to be just fine.

Not exactly.

Anti-allergy and clean-air protesters flooded into the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency the next day. They were loud, and one woman wore a gas mask. It worked. The authority ordered that the scent strips be removed. They said we hadn’t “cleared them” with the city. They were, they added, “a dangerous precedent.”

The same news outlets all returned. They asked how I felt.

I said I understood people’s concern, but that it was hard to separate this method of advertising from, say, a bakery that uses a fan to transport smells out onto the sidewalk or a hot dog stand that smells good. The scent strips, after all, were made of FDA-approved food oils. The complexity of this argument made the reporters glaze over.

“I guess the city’s bus shelters are once again safe to smell like urine and vomit like they always have,” I added. They liked that better.

The next day, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom happened to come over to our agency to thank the staff for producing a TV campaign to help the homeless and dispossessed.

“What about those bus shelters?” he kidded me. “I got calls all day long yesterday, people complaining.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Get out of here,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen. You got publicity for them going up, then you got publicity again when we took them down.”

The bus shelters now sat unscented, with only the black-and-white “got milk?” signs puzzlingly adorning their interiors. Thomas and Byron, the creative guys, suggested that we put up a recipe for real chocolate chip cookies. We looked into it. It was too late.

“Make a T-shirt,” I told them.

We all now have shirts that say, “If the smell of cookies is outlawed, only outlaws will have cookies.” People ask me about mine all the time.

“It’s a long story,” I tell them.