• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, October 2, 2009

The Fragrance Foundation says the campaign is aimed at the 62 million consumers who already use fragrance at least once in a while, and hopes it will entice them to spritz more often. And while individual perfume advertisers are big ad spenders in their own right, the thinking is that a unified campaign would boost everyone's results.

"Our goal was to get people to refocus on the juice," Stephen Niedzwiecki, owner and creative director of Yard, the New York ad agency that created the campaign, tells Marketing Daily. "We want to get them to fall in love again with what's in the bottle, and remind them of the artistry and the alchemy in a single drop of fragrance."

Ads feature the silhouette of a fragrance atomizer, which frames interchangeable visuals and impact words, such as: "One drop and you're fabulous," "One drop and you feel like a million," "One drop and you're in love," and "One drop and you're in the corner office."

The point is, he says, that people love perfume for its transformative power. "As an icon, the atomizer is perfect for that -- people recognize it from two inches away, or at 20 feet, and it is understood to be a holding vessel for all kinds of different moods and personalities."

Ads are breaking in January, just in time for Valentine's Day -- a big day for perfume marketers -- and are scheduled to run in beauty and fashion magazines, as well as on Web sites. Additional media buys are being finalized, and may include building wraps and billboards. "But social media will be a very important component of the campaign," he says. A microsite, onemightydrop.com, will allow consumers to find new fragrances based on smells they already like.

The latest figures from NPD Group report that prestige fragrance sales declined another 10% to $1 billion in the first six months of the year.