Oath isn’t just Verizon’s cultishly-named agglomeration of Yahoo, AOL, and 12 other legacy web brands of varying relevance — it’s also a fragrance.
Screenshot: oath.companystore
The scent, which was given the name “Empowered”, isn’t sold in a bottle for easy dousing. The only way to imbue one’s body with the fusty stench of Web 1.0 is through a 15.2 x 20.3cm “Oath Scented Notebook”, available for $US18 ($23) on the company’s online store. (Whether it’s a scented notebook from Oath, or a notebook which is Oath-scented seems to be an academic distinction.)
From the company’s webstore (emphasis ours):
Oath makes no compromises when it comes to brand experience. The scent of Oath, Empowered, channels our authenticity and optimism with a fragrance structured by natural cedarwood, cardamom and iris, brightened with notes of juicy grapefruit and salty ozone. It’s a fresh, dynamic scent – perfect for ambassadors of innovation who are committed to building brands people love.
Remember scratch-and-sniffs? Well, this isn’t your grandfather’s Scented Notebook. That’s why Oath says the pungent commerce experience “requires activation through a ‘rub and smell’ technology.” It’s very different. The notebook is unruled, presumably because rules are the last thing go-getting “ambassadors of innovation” need getting between them and a synergistic “brand experience.”
While the absence of any saved caches of the Oath store on the Internet Archive leaves it unclear how long the Oath Scented Notebook — as well as other offerings like a branded fidget spinner or a $US99 ($127) branded Patagonia jacket — have been available, it suggests something about amount of interest anyone has had in purchasing one so far.
We have reached out to Oath for more information and will update this post if and when we hear back. May we all someday open our nostrils to this courageous new brand experience.