If you are a frequent reader of Motivators’ blogs, you have heard that line quite often, and it’s the truth. Promotional Products Work! There are a number of factors and plenty of research that lends credence to that statement, but I am not going to regurgitate any statistics or pull out the pie charts and graphs because I can prove it from having experienced it for myself just a few short weeks ago. As many of you may have heard, Motivators TV took a trip to the Roosevelt Field Mall a few weeks ago when the cast of Fox’s ‘Glee’ was making an album signing appearance there.

The initial purpose of the trip was to promote Motivators by offering each member of the cast promotional hand sanitizers that had Motivators’ logo and contact information on them. Hand sanitizers seemed like the most appropriate promotional product to give them since they would be touching hundreds of album covers that were being held by other people, not to mention shaking hands with the fans.

Of course, promotional Sharpie markers would’ve made a relevant promotional giveaway for the cast, but on short notice we did not have any custom imprinted Sharpies with our information on them. Either way, it was a great opportunity for Motivators to potentially get our name in the heads of the ‘Glee’ cast, Fox promoters or public relations directors so that they’ll consider using us for all of their future promotional products needs. 

The other purpose was of course to cover the event in hopes of creating a video for Motivators.tv that was worth watching. However, I thought that a few seconds of footage talking about how we gave the cast custom hand sanitizers, wasn’t quite enough as far as entertaining video content was concerned. Seeing as how we decided to do this at the last minute, I thought about what we already had here in the office, when I remembered that we had a never-been-used-before promotional mp3 speaker / carrier that had our logo and contact information on it. That’s when the big idea really hit me. Everyone attending the event is going to be celebrating the music from this show, so why not interact with the excited crowd by connecting the mp3 speaker and playing songs from the ‘Glee’ album for them to sing along with? In addition, I figured we could give the singing volunteers an added incentive to belt it out by offering them the mp3 speaker as a prize for the best and bravest singer.

This turned out to be a huge hit and we even had excited volunteers screaming at us to come and video tape them while we were in the middle of filming other people. We even managed to hand out some promotional sunglasses and custom imprinted mint boxes to many of the fans waiting in line. You can check out the video at the bottom of the post if you are curious to see what a bunch of excited, singing teenagers sound like. Not to mention a great performance by Tony as our host and a dash of an enthusiastic Sarah Shepherd who may or may not have sung and danced in the midst of all the excitement. 

But the real point of this blog was to illustrate how promotional products work. Sure, the Motivators name was very prominent at the event with all of the giveaways and us telling people to visit Motivators.tv to check themselves out on video. But it was our own promotional products that really worked for us that day. As I mentioned, we decided to cover this event at the last minute. In fact, it was the morning of the day it was taking place. Therefore, not only did we have to use the promotional products that we already had, but we didn’t have the time to get press passes before the event. So when we got there nobody really knew who we were or why we were there. Luckily, Sarah, Tony and I all had promotional polo shirts with the Motivators TV logo on it, and we all strapped on a Motivators TV custom lanyard for good measure. 

Without this we would’ve been looked at as regular people or fans with a video camera. Despite the lack of press passes, our uniform appearance got us respect at the event and we were asked by several people what type of organization we were. I think it is safe to assume we wouldn’t have been treated that way without the promotional products we were wearing. In fact, the PR representative for the event wound up getting us press passes after only being there for just a short time. I am sure the hype and excitement we were generating amongst the hundreds of fans helped our cause, but promotional products can definitely help any company or organization to ‘fit the part’. 

Promotional Products are generally inexpensive, but they can give you or your company the professional look that you desire. The proof is in the footage, without the press passes I wouldn’t have been able to film the cast from an arms length away, or get close-up shots of our promotional hand sanitizers sitting on the table that the cast was sitting at. We even spoke to and interviewed the parents of Jenna Ushkowitz, who plays Tina on the show. 

Overall it was a pretty successful endeavor for all parties and it just goes to show you that promotional products work!