Photography: Media Bakery

Ready to take the experience-it-yourself ethos of those old scratch-and-sniff inserts to a different level? Then Taste-It Notes is for you. The product promises to give customers a “taste” of a particular food or beverage product in a peel-away ad.

Manufactured by First Flavor, Inc., of Bala Cynwyd, PA, and marketed by Hackensack, NJ-based US Ink, Taste-It Notes is being pitched as something newspapers can offer readers that cable television and the internet can't. The ads, inserted in regular paper newspapers, have a peel-away layer covering a flavor strip that can be used to give a customer an idea of the taste of the product being advertised.

Assuming customers don't mind licking their morning fishwrap, the peel-and-taste ads promise to provide marketers with a much wider dissemination of product “samples” than is possible with those in-store giveaways.

Just goes to show how desperate newspapers are to draw and retain readers in the face of 24-hour cable and ubiquitous internet…