The steak is not on your plate but on a billboard on a North Carolina highway.

The board was put up by the Bloom chain of grocery stores with the aim of promoting a new line of Angus beef in its stores, and the scent was added to reach consumers through their noses as well as their eyes.

The steak aroma was provided by Charlotte's ScentAir Technologies, whose specialty is providing scents for just such purposes.

Air cartridges filled with scented oil were positioned at the base of the billboard, and at peak drive times, 7 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 7 p.m. daily, super-powerful fans were cranked up to blow the scent over the highway and into oncoming cars.

The campaign ran for roughly three weeks, from May 28 to June 18, on a billboard on N.C. 150 in Mooresville.

The scent wasn't the only creative thing about the billboard. The pole supporting the billboard was made to look like a fork, with the tines extending up onto the board and into the hunk of meat.

But it was the scent technology that drew all the attention, leading to tons of press coverage, including stories by the Associated Press, NPR and a slew of large regional papers.

Yet perhaps the best testament to the effectiveness of the campaign came from an entirely different camp, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, after it got wind of it, so to speak.

PETA, being against all things carnivorous, was absolutely outraged at the glamorization of meat, so it's now negotiating to erect its own smelly billboard on the same stretch of road.

PETA argues that the real smell of meat is one of rotted flesh, urine, feces and blood, and it says it intends to pump out those odors if it can secure a billboard for its counter-campaign.

Whether it should ever erect such a billboard is problematic, but its very public reaction to the Bloom campaign brought on yet even more coverage.