Across the Great Divide

Banishing Freebies.

A Duluth-based health system is banning all drug company giveaways from its clinics and hospitals.

In all, SMDC employees have turned in more than 18,700 items, including clocks, mugs, surgical caps, calculators, tape dispensers, and a stress-relieving squeeze toy made to look like a red blood cell.

The idea is to reduce the subliminal influence of ubiquitous drug company logos around the provider's premises.

The loss of all this swag will not likely reduce health care costs on the clinic side, even though they will now have to pay up for pens, pads and other formerly pharmaceutical paraphernalia. Nor will it cut marketing spending by the drug companies. They'll just find some other ways to promote their wares.

Nor is this good news for doctors, because it means they are likely to receive even more of this stuff at home.

On any given day, the mail to our household might contain a CD-ROM, 10 copies of Fit Pregnancy magazine, a calculator, or the ever-popular pen (I am set for life, thanks). My Lexapro travel mug is quite nice, but I have to be careful showing up at client meetings bearing coffee in mug hyping an anti-depressant.

The oddest freebie was a Zenergy chime bearing the brand of a hormone replacement. Since it strikes an A note, a handy tuning reference, I keep it on the piano.

I have a few other pharma collectibles, such as the pen styled as a hypodermic needle that fills with red fluid. I imagine some day — if not already — people will collect this stuff.

But I prefer to focus on the golden era of advertising specialties, specifically, mechanical pencils. I love finding 1950s-era milk cartons stuck on top, pistons floating in oil or seed corn encased in plastic. Generations later, we still know what that stuff is (though I wonder if sales at Ohio Piston Company saw much of a boost from the giveaway).

But who will fondly recall Activell or Prometrium?

Pencil of the Day: Woodies

Turned wood pencils were ideal for promoting businesses associated with wood or wood products.

The bowling pin pencil for Silver City Recreation is a perfect realization of a promotional specialty item. It told you immediately what the name didn't — that you could bowl there. And it had real utility, since score sheets were filled in by pencil. Finally, the shape of the pin fit the hand in a usable, but memorable way.

The baseball bat pencil takes a different tack. It promotes General Electric home laundry equipment. What possible connection does that have with baseball, you ask? "It's a Hit." This promo was clearly  aimed at retailers or distributors, not the consumer. Perhaps the campaign also included baseball tickets for top sellers.

Norha's "The Friendly Corner" on East Lake Street in Minneapolis is certainly willing to sell you a beer. Should you feel the need for reservati0ns, you can call ahead. But otherwise, the concept could as well have been rendered in Bakelite or as a clear plastic floater.

Three more examples,  including variations on the bat theme. The darker pencil promotes a Boston envelope company. What's significant here is the early example of sports marketing — using an association with a sports brand to sell an unrelated product. The pencil has the familiar tradmark and statement, "Genuine Louisville Slugger."

The thinner bat places the pencil on the barrel end. Unlike the others, it promotes an actual sport shop, though with a flying goose logo and National Dairy Cattle Congress trademark, it's likely this Waterloo, Iowa, shop sold more shotgun shells and fishing tackle than baseball equipment.

The Funk's "G" pencil features a 360-degree imprint of Uncle Sam, with the letter V followed by its Morse Code  rendering of  ...–, suggesting this was produced during World War Two, when V for Victory was widely used.

Douglas Ritchie of the BBC European Service, suggested an audible V using the Morse code rhythm — three dots and a dash. This is the rhythm of the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (fifth can of course also be written as V^th), and it was used as the call-sign by the BBC in its foreign language programmes to occupied Europe for the rest of the war.

Pencil of the Day: Big Greenie.

This is one of my favorite workaday pencils. Six-inches long and solid, its long barrel holds a full length of lead, with ample storage under the eraser for more.

If you're going to a desert island with one writing implement, this is it.

The barrel is semi-clear in the gaps between the green basket weave pattern, affording a glimpse of the propelling mechanism. The design says 1950s school pencil for a kid lucky enough to afford an upgrade from a standard Scripto.

And the clip with its chrome worn away still says: American.