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Promotions have been used for a long time in business, but sometimes the promotion business can get a little strange.  From dancing apes in front of cell phone stores, to company presidents getting dunked in water tanks, we all have seen wacky promotion at its best.  But if you think about it, and you really think about it, what are some of the silliest, the craziest, and the wackiest promotional products to ever hit the streets.  Enquiring minds want to know?

Giving away promotional items can be a great strategy for any established business promoting their brand, or any new business looking to make a name for itself.  What better way to make a name for yourself than by introducing wacky promotional items to your customers.  You might be asking yourself, well arent my customers wacky enough as it is already?  Why would I want to encourage these wonderful customers of mine, to even get wackier than they already are?   The reason is because its good for business.

It has often been proven that wacky and sometimes even silly promotional items can turn into cool promotional items that people will value for a long time to come.  For example, take something we all loved and cherished at one time, the McDonalds Happy Meal. The Happy Meal was the brainchild of St. Louis, Missouri advertising manager Dick Brams, who in 1977 developed the idea as a way to promote McDonalds as a restaurant for families.  Dick Brams concluded that if he put wacky promotion items in the bags, along with the food being served, then it would start a gigantic buzz and be an enormous hit.  I think he may have been on to something.  The very first Happy Meal premiums were toy Star Ships from the video game Space Invaders.

Thirty years ago we must have thought such promotions silly, and obscure at best.  But today silly and wacky promotions are nothing new and engrained into our consciousness and culture.  No one around the world ever forgets a good promotion, especially if its wacky enough.  Who ever forgets about great promotions when they were able to get a pizza for only a penny or able try that delicious buffet for the first time, all for free?  What great memories. 

But all of that is childs play compared to the wackiest promotion products of all time.  What about a tiny music violin that can play 7 different tunes?  Or what about the Wine Bottle Umbrella Holder? We have seen promotional products being passed out to customers like the Stainless Steal Body Fat analyzer and the waterproof life-sized duck radio; we have seen it all.  But the wackiest of all time has to come from a European beauty company for Switzerland who, Im not kidding you, passed out soap made out of real human fat, which was supposedly a high end product they were selling.  People didnt actually know that many of their products were actually made from human parts, and needless to say, this company wasnt around for very much longer. I guess they didnt trim the fat, and shortly after went out of business.

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