Pop star Selena Gomez is promoting a fragrance by her Rare Beauty line with a scratch-and-sniff billboard in New York City. FOX 5 NY's Jessica Formoso tries it out for herself and sees what New Yorkers and experts have to say about this marketing tactic.

New York

Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty brand has launched its first fragrance with an innovative marketing campaign in New York City. Scented billboards have been installed in three locations, allowing people to scratch and sniff the advertisement to experience the perfume directly.

The campaign has attracted widespread attention, going viral on social media platforms and drawing crowds to the billboards. Marketing experts have praised the approach as a creative and effective way to engage consumers, offering a direct sampling experience that has generated significant buzz for the new product.

Selena Gomez debuts scented billboard in NYC

In New York, asking what's that smell can be a very loaded question, but in one part of town, the answer may pleasantly surprise you. Yeah, as Fox 5's Jessica Formosa shows us, it all has to do with Selena Gomez and some perfumed billboards. Stop, scratch, and sniff a billboard. Smells really good, I'd get it. What they are smelling is perfume. Pop star Selena Gomez promoting the first fragrance by her popular Rare Beauty line in a very unique and creative way to make the billboards, her marketing team developed a scented ink which releases the fragrance when folks scratch the designated area. It's funny at first, I didn't believe it. I thought it was just like a joke, but I can, I smell it and I like it. I guess it worked. But I think this for sure gets your attention and it's like more interactive and more like a little more personal, I guess, than like the free samples that you get. I know that everyone's going wild for it though. There's a lot of buzz around this fragrance on social media. So of course we had to come out and try it out for ourselves. Yes, it does smell really good. Now, marketing experts say this is brilliant marketing, something that has never been done before. It is such the obvious stroke for launching a scent. So normally with billboards, you see them, you read them, you walk past them. But with this billboard, you interact and it appeals to yet another sense, not just your eyes, not just your mind, but your nose as well. And so it's a sampling opportunity. Mark DeMassimo, a marketing expert, says the return on investment for this idea is much more than what Selena's team spent on the billboards. The amplification of this story, people like us talking about it here, people talking about it online, people going and interacting with it and sharing it, it's massive unpaid extensions of their media. I think it's really cool marketing. It definitely gets you to stop. I'm interested in buying it now. It's clearly paying off, going viral on TikTok, getting people to come right to one of the three billboards across New York City, which will come down on Thursday. Saw a TikTok video, had to come see if it's real. Love the smell or hate it, it's working. People are talking about it. In Chelsea, I'm Jessica Formoso, Fox 5 News.

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