Best. Billboard. Ever.

Over the years there have been any number of stories, television skits, scenes from movies and so on about advertising media that would be truly interactive with the target market – print ads or electronic media that would carry the smell or texture of food products, ads through which you could touch or feel the product, and so on. There have been a number of attempts to produce such things in real life, although they have largely been on the primitive side – scented inserts in magazines selling fragrances, for example, or billboards promoting bakery companies that emit the smell of freshly-made cinnamon rolls. But the ultimate version of this concept would be an ad in which the target customer could actually sample the product – taste it, ingest it, or the equivalent. The infamous “television chocolate” from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one familiar example – a television commercial where it is possible for the viewer to reach into the screen and pull out an (edible) bar of chocolate…

Needless to say, in real life there would probably be several more immediate applications for a device that can send physical matter over television transmissions, and even the fantasy writers have been unable to explain how you could input one chocolate bar into your transmitter and allow thousands or millions of viewers to draw it out of their personal set. So despite the incredible impact this concept would have on potential customers, it has remained in the realm of fantasy, or at best science fiction – until now…

According to a story posted online by the Daily Record (UK) Carlsberg Beer has set up a billboard near their brewery in London that features an actual beer tap. Anyone who want to sample the company’s product can simply walk up and pull themselves a glass of beer from the tap. It’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like they also have security personnel (or possible police officers) keeping an eye on the tap to make sure everyone stays orderly and no one tries just drinking directly from the tap until they pass out. Given that all of this is happening in England it isn’t at all surprising to see that a long and enthusiastic but extremely orderly line has formed to wait for the free drinks…

Now, I don’t imagine I have to explain why this stunt would never work in the US – or any other place with a definite restriction on drinking age. I can also see it being an issue in places where under-age drinking isn’t a major factor but drunken bad behavior (and riots) is. And in much of the world I would actually be less worried about people overdoing it when they drink from the tap than I would be about people showing up with gallon bottles, five-gallon drums or armloads of quart/liter bottles and trying to appropriate as much of the free beer for themselves as possible. But as advertising stunts go it’s amazing, and it makes me wonder if you could apply the same idea to other types of product…

What about a billboard that didn’t just make people walking by see and smell the product, but also made samples available to try? You could have garment ads that allowed people to feel the fabric, or ads for consumer goods that had working features you could actually try out – although I suppose that given the tendency in this country to use sex to sell literally everything, it would only be a matter of time before somebody tried to combine all of these elements and ended up with a billboard ad you couldn’t show on television without being hit by massive fines from the FCC…

Maybe it’s just as well that the concept has been limited to beer so far…