Magazines attachment fever

In 1965, two engineers at IBM invented the scratch and sniff strip, while looking for a way to make carbonless paper. By 1979, the perfume strip was inserted for the first time into a printed magazine. The scent was so strong that "you could kind of smell it before you even opened the magazine," recalled Diane Crecca, vice-president of sales, marketing and business development at Arcade Marketing, which invented the scent strip.

And it doesn't end there.

"With blinking lights, pop-up ads, kiss-on lipstick samples, scratch-off scents, melt-in-your-mouth taste strips, and even pocket squares, advertisers are stuffing magazines full of just about anything to make their advertisements stand out.
One reason for the phenomenon is better technology, which makes it less expensive to put unusual objects in magazines and which helps advertisers create more sophisticated inserts. [...]
But there is another dynamic at work: with so much of the publishing industry shifting toward the Web, magazine executives are trying to use their print products as a tactical advantage."
(Source: For magazines, 'be clever or die' - International Herald Tribune.)

They are forgetting the "product plus" magazine attachments: the books, cds and dvds that are now sold together with many of today's newspapers and magazines. And who sometimes make more money for the publishers than the regular print editions do...