Leave it to Kraft Foods and Nickelodeon to intentionally develop a promotion that stinks. 

The packaged goods giant and the kids' cable network, which have successfully teamed up on several occasions (If you have children, chances are you've dined on Rugrats Macaroni & Cheese.), last September devised a sense-enhancing campaign called Smell-O-Vision. The truly interactive effort (even in the days of the online promo) was designed to increase sales and merchandising of Kraft Kids Brands products while generating awareness and driving viewership for Nickelodeon's Nickel-O-Zone weekday prime-time programming block. 

Smell-O-Vision did its best to reinvent how children watch TV by incorporating their noses as well as their eyes. That required Nickelodeon to completely retool the Nickel-O-Zone series Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power, Cousin Skeeter and Kablam to include "play along" elements.

 "This promotion was 18 to 24 months in the making," says Pam Kaufman, New York City-based Nick's senior vp-promotions and marketing. "We changed our own shows to accomodate this."

 Nickelodeon ran "how to play" and "tune in" spots for five weeks in August and September, encouraging kids to prepare for the Smell-O-Vision experience by obtaining scratch-and-sniff cards and 3-D glasses from Kraft Kids packages. 

Glenview, IL-based Kraft supported the effort on approximately 70 million packages of Mac & Cheese, Polly-O, Jell-O, Oscar Mayer Lunchables, Kool-Aid, and Post cereals that featured Nick characters along with the scratch-and-s niff cards and glasses. Packages also boasted 3-D visuals that extended the promotion's shelf-life beyond the programming event. EastWest Creative, New York City, handled. 

Kraft sponsored a branded Smell-O-Vision Web site in conjuntion with Nick.com that featured games utilizing the 3-D glasses and sniff cards; it was Kraft's first promotional Web site. The company also ran ads and a scented 3-D bookcover in Nickelodeon Magazine. Blockbuster, Inc., Dallas, got into the action by distributing more than 500,000 Smell-O-Vision kits containing the glasses and cards in-store. 

During the programming block, icons appeared on the screen prompting kids to either put on their glasses or smell their cards. 

The promotion drew more than 20 million total viewers, including five million adults. More than 11 million children - neary 40 percent of all kids two to 11 in cable-equipped households - participated in Smell-O-Vision. Ratings for Nickel-O-Zone shot up 12 percent over the four weeks prior to the promotion. For Kraft, the effort yielded a 7.7 percent increase in total merchandising volume for the 11 participating brands. 

"Smell-O-Vision enabled us to create a fully integrated event across all the touch-points in a kid's world," says Kraft Marketing Services director Lisa Coker. "Smell-O-Vision will ultimately be used as a benchmark to `raise the bar' for future kids' events. It was one of the most successful back-to-school programs in the history of Kraft and Nickelodeon, with very strong volume results for the Kraft brands and viewership increases for Nick." 

"Working with Kraft was great," says Kaufman. "The company supports the network in a significant way. It was a challenging effort to develop, but we worked with individuals who were very flexible." 

The partners say they benefited from their long history together. "Nickelodeon and Kraft have been partners for nearly five years, starting with a back-to-school program in 1996," says Coker. "Together, we have consistently created unique innovation and superior execution to deliver impressive results. Partnering with Nick enables us to create an umbrella concept that can be used across all brands, while also allowing flexibility for individual brands to choose specific properties that are most appropriate to feature on-pack."