Perfume ads are not like other ads. It is uniquely difficult to advertise an olfactory product via a visual medium, and this leads to some unusual outcomes.
A game that my loved ones and I like to play in the cinema is called: ‘Booze, car or perfume?’ When a particularly abstract pre-movie advert begins, you have to guess which of the three it is. A pretty reliable heuristic I have found is that the more baffling, alienating and nonsensical the advert is, the more likely it is to be a perfume ad.
