What is the most memorable swag you've received?
With everything from Soda Can Kozies to Gloves given out as swag, what have you found to be the most memorable? Do you still have that swag around? And most importantly... do you remember which company that was for?
4 Answers
Funny & Unique- The Business of Software 2009 conference gave out a Slanket. Hilarious (at least, I think it was intended to be...).
Different & Professional - My company did a custom printing of O'Reilly's Mind Hacks book. It's basically the standard book, but with our company logo on the cover and a couple other places. Pretty classy (and definitely longer lived than your typical plastic swag... sorry Slanket!). If you can find a book that really speaks to your target audience (and a flexible enough publisher), this can work really well.
Dangerous (in a good way) - We found the foam finger rockets to be wildly fun (and dangerous)... below is an example (not our's), if you haven't seen one. They do tend to stay 'around' for a while... at least until they are confiscated. I still remember our team getting some really dirty looks from adjacent booths when they were 'accidentally' bombarded with these.
Photo Credit: rcrowley CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 And here is how you use it...
Photo Credit: foreverdigital CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Finger rockets are great! We used them as a morale booster at officeclick.com (now known as vendavo.com) back in 1999 or so and everyone loved them! – Tcolling 14 years ago
A company called Zygo during the dot com boom in 2000 brought us thick multi-colored professionally made books that were completely blank. It was so characteristic of the wasteful money being spent at that time that I saved it and still show it to people. I recently spoke to someone from that company and they told me they went through 40mil in VC money and never brought in a dime of revenue.
I remember getting a hockey puck from Sun, one time. That was memorable, as it was my first, and only time, playing broom hockey.
It was also different, so it stood out, and I still have it. :)
I remember back in Comdex days (land o' swag!) a company named edsun labs that had a battery powered fluorescent light pin of their logo (a lower case e). They were a nominee at an industry event, and when their name was announced, they all put on their glowing e pins. After the event, they started handing them out, and every industry party / event you went to you saw one of these "e"s .
The company has since been merged with analog devices, so I haven't found a pic of the pin.
