A Promotion for Mud-Flap Fans?
For what product or service would the Silhouette Girl Flashing Pin (right) be an appropriate promotional product?
You’ve seen the Silhouette Girl: She’s the poor man’s version of the Vargas Girl, lounging on the mud flaps of 16-wheelers from coast to coast. According to the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), a magnetic pin of her image, with a half-dozen flashing colored lights accentuating her curves, is one of the “top 10 sexiest Valentine’s Day promo products.”
In a press release touting its list of sexy promotional items, the ASI helpfully explains that “promotional products, or advertising specialties, are items imprinted with logos or slogans to market a company, organization, product, service, achievement or event. Companies often purchase them as giveaways to employees or clients at holidays and for occasions year-round, and marketers often include them in their campaigns to increase response rates.”
Any company that does not want to be slapped with a sexual harassment suit would be wise to avoid giving this pin as an incentive to employees. And I can’t imagine a company, organization, service, achievement, or event that would benefit from being marketed via the Silhouette Girl Flashing Pin. Indeed, the only product that seems a logical tie-in would be the actual Silhouette Girl mud flaps.
Then again, perhaps this lack of imagination is why I ended up in journalism rather than in promotions and PR. So if anyone could enlighten me as to the circumstances in which the Silhouette Girl Flashing Pin is an ideal promo product, I’d really appreciate it.
February 9th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Obviously this isn’t the ideal promotional product for a corporate entity, but there is definitely a client for this item (ie. mechanic or auto/moto trade shows, alcohol promotions, race events, male-targeted promotions, etc.). The bigger picture here is that ASI (a for-profit company that pretends to be a non-profit trade organization) published this “sexy” list as a publicity stunt that ended up making the industry look stupid and cheap.