Promotional Products & Marketing Blog

It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to showcase a retro promo on this blog. Luckily, our CEO happened to be rooting around his in-laws’ house this weekend and stumbled across this pack of promotional playing cards that look like they’re from the 80s!

The back of each card features a nice full-color imprint of a hip-looking couple pumping iron, as well as the contact info for Mademoiselle Fitness Centers.

I love retro promos because they show just how long promotional items can last. If you’re looking for a marketing strategy with an impressive shelf life, promotional products are the way to go. Useful items like this pack of playing cards can deliver longer-lasting (and more affordable) brand exposure than TV, print, or online media. I’m sure Mademoiselle would agree!

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You can still get promotional cameras, but not like this. Happy times indeed when Coke and Kodak put this together. One interesting note: this seems to predate the “have a Coke and a smile” campaign, which would have been a perfect match for this product.

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My friend Dave was kind enough to forward me a link to this amazing vehicle. Perhaps a predecessor to the much-loved Wienermobile and the lesser-known Voxmobile. This particular carvertisement is from Australia in 1934.

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Ah, Max Headroom. He was the face of New Coke, which essentially makes him the face of all that was wrong about 80s pop culture. He was actually originally an announcer for a British music video program, which was then turned into a TV movie in the UK and a television series in the US. According to good ol’ wikipedia, the back story for the shows was this:

The background story provided for the Max Headroom character presents a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. Max Headroom was shown to have been created from the memories of Edison Carter. The character’s name came from the last thing Carter saw during a vehicular accident that put him into a coma: A bar with a sign warning of low clearance, marked “Max. Headroom” along with the height of the bar.

Today, we celebrate him in vintage promotional sticker form:

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With the brand about to be pared down to a few models as a boutique brand due to ongoing troubles at GM, I bet a lot of Pontiac fans (and dealerships that are about to close) could really use these tissues right about now.

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The sixties were a time of great social upheaval. Kids were turning on, tuning in, dropping out and wearing paper dresses. According to my sources, paper clothing was seen as futuristic, and started as a mail-in promotion: The fad can be traced back to 1966 when manufacturing company Scott Paper Company used the paper dress to promote their toilet paper and paper tissues. In exchange of $1.25, happy housewives would be mailed a paisley or op-art ‘Paper Caper’ dress and some coupons to buy napkins and toilet rolls. Demand exceeded the 500,000 garments produced and other manufacturers soon followed with designs to promote their own goods. To the right is a promotional paper dress created for Universal Studios.

If you’re in Europe, you can revisit this golden era of promotional clothing at the RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion exhibit, currently in Luxembourg, but headed to Belgium and London. Below are a couple Warhol-style paper dresses, including one that was actually used as a promotional product by Campbell’s Soup Company.

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Nowadays computer bags are popular, and we use them to carry our laptops. Back in the 1980s, though, they used them to carry around first generation Macintoshes. And actually, back then they even had a “Test Drive a Macintosh” program where you could borrow one for a day, hence the Apple-branded bags to carry them.

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Olympic history…to be continued! More promos, more mascots and more memorabilia in Vancouver 2010, London 2012 and beyond. Stay tuned!

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Here’s a cool Polaroid promotional calculator, and a few more calculator museums for the curious: The Dutch Calculator Museum looks like it may actually have a physical collection, The Museum of Soviet Calculators, Programmable Calculators, and Edwin Russell’s Virtual Calculator Museum. And, of course, let me not forget the best calculator of all time ever.

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