When someone invokes Smell-O-Vision, it’s usually a wistful concept, perhaps as a particularly delectable-looking scene plays out on screen: Wow, imagine if Smell-O-Vision were real right now!

The gag is, it’s real. Back in 1960, Scent of Mystery was one of the first films to get the scented cinema treatment. Hans Laube invented the tech and tried to make it a thing, but there were plenty of challenges and complaints—it was too expensive, the scents were too fake, too strong, not strong enough, etc.

For the A24 horror film Heretic this fall, Joya Studio, a fragrance and design brand, took on the challenge of bringing scent into theaters once again, this time with blueberry pie-scented screenings of the film. Joya and A24 have worked together before on a collection of branded candles tied to classic film genres, like sci-fi and noir, and this time, leaning into the artificiality rather than trying to mask it was key to making the scent stunt work, Frederick Bouchardy, founder of Joya Studio, told Marketing Brew.

“I think the artificialness is a bit of an inside baseball or inside joke for us,” Bouchardy said. “It’s not sticking our nose up at this. It’s almost like paying homage to that.”

From screen to nose: To bring Heretic beyond the screen, the scent tech and fragrance development company pumped select screenings at Alamo Drafthouse theaters with the scent of blueberry pie at a pivotal moment in the film: when the protagonists begin to suspect that there isn’t a woman in the other room baking a pie as they have been led to believe, at which point they turn a burning candle around to reveal it is blueberry pie-scented.

Cue: a conspicuously artificial blueberry-scented experience powered by Joya equipment that atomized the smell directly into the theater.

“It was very strategic,” Bouchardy said. “It has to happen at one specific part in the film that’s, like, perversely funny.”

Continue reading here.—JN

Get your TikTok Shop hauls in while you can.

On Friday, a federal appeals court in DC upheld the law signed by President Joe Biden earlier this year that will ban TikTok on January 19 unless the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, sells or divests its US assets.

The court cited national security concerns in its ruling and rejected the argument—made by TikTok and others—that the ban violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the main opinion. “Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

What now? The case will likely go to the Supreme Court as ByteDance seeks a more favorable outcome before the law goes into effect. President Biden has the ability to grant a one-time, 90-day extension on the ban timeline, but only if ByteDance shows progress in finding a buyer.

With President-elect Donald Trump set to be sworn in on January 20, one day after the ban is set to take place, there are still questions about how he and his administration might choose to act should the law go into effect.

• Trump previously tried to ban TikTok via executive order in 2020, but he has since said he’s against a ban—as have some of his major donors, like billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Yass.
• The president-elect currently has more than 14 million TikTok followers and used the platform extensively during his campaign.

Read more here.—KH

Trim up the tree—the advertising economy is growing faster than anticipated, just in time for the holidays.

Global advertising revenue is expected to grow 9.5% in 2024, 1.7% higher than previously projected, according to a rosy forecast from GroupM published Monday. That puts advertising industry revenue at $1.04 trillion, surpassing the $1 trillion mark for the first time. Next year, ad revenue is expected to grow 7.7%, reaching roughly $1.1 trillion, GroupM said.

In the US alone, advertising revenue is expected to grow 9% to $379 billion in 2024, with 7% of growth expected in 2025.

Where’d that revenue go? Mostly to digital platforms, as one might expect.

Digital advertising, which includes everything from programmatic to streaming inventory to digital OOH, accounted for 81.7% of ad spend, GroupM found. The triopoly of Google, Meta, and Amazon accounted for 41% of all global advertising revenue. (So maybe don’t expect such a blowout holiday party?)

Retail media, which GroupM previously forecast would surpass linear and CTV ad spend by 2028, is now expected to get there by next year, growing to $176.9 billion by 2025 and representing 15.9% of total advertising.

Continue reading here.—RB

Executive moves across the industry.

• Bumble CMO Selby Drummond is leaving her post in January as part of a broader leadership change at the company.
• J.Crew hired Skims vet Julia Collier as its new CMO, per WWD. She starts next month.
• Meta elevated Simon Whitcombe to lead the company’s North America business, according to Ad Age.