Zurich — The Lost Sense Experience (Germany)
GOLD — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
An immersive experience transformed the often-overlooked loss of smell into something people could feel—and helped people discover that the sense may sometimes be trained and partially regained.
Submitted by OMD Germany
Winner’s Citation
For transforming an invisible and often underestimated consequence of COVID into a tangible human experience—using media, technology and sensory storytelling not only to create empathy, but to help people understand that loss of smell does not always have to be accepted as irreversible.
How It Makes a World of Difference
Insurance is built around protection. Yet much of the category communicates that promise through risks, rates and what people stand to lose.
Zurich approached protection from another direction: What are the things people most want to preserve?
That question led to something easily overlooked. After COVID, millions of people in Germany experienced loss of smell, affecting not simply a physical sense but the everyday experiences and memories attached to it—the scent of summer, popcorn at the movies or something familiar from a grandparent’s garden.
The Lost Sense Experience set out to make that invisible loss tangible.
At the center was an immersive Berlin exhibition that invited visitors into familiar environments stripped of their expected scents. An AI-powered questionnaire then translated visitors’ own favorite moments into individualized scents they could take home as a bottled piece of memory.
The idea extended into outdoor media. Familiar scent-associated objects—flowers, popcorn, lemons—were visually wrapped and sealed, deliberately denying people something their brains instinctively expected. Placements near flower shops, cafés and cinemas connected the imagery to real-world scent associations, while a giant wrapped lemon mural in Berlin invited people into the experience.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing made an invisible condition visible—and helped turn awareness of loss into awareness of possibility.
The work did more than ask people to empathize with those who had lost their sense of smell. Through collaboration among research, medical, creative and media specialists, it also introduced an important and potentially hopeful idea: the sense of smell can sometimes be trained and partially regained.
That is the meaningful consequence.
Zurich used the tools of marketing not simply to communicate what the brand protects, but to bring renewed attention to an overlooked human problem—and help people see that what appeared permanently lost might not always be.
Results That Make a Difference
The campaign demonstrated both human and brand impact.
Three out of four respondents said the experience made them more aware of the emotional importance of scent, while 43% learned through the campaign that smell can be trained and partially regained.
At the same time, Zurich saw a four-percentage-point increase in brand consideration, a 50% increase in first-choice values and a 75% boost in brand presence within the target region. The campaign also generated more than 13 million impressions and a 40% social engagement rate.
Most importantly, an issue that had largely disappeared from public conversation was made visible again—not through another message about insurance, but through an experience that helped people understand what it means to lose something most of us rarely think about until it is gone.
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