I-40 - Risking life, limb and logos for free stuff

I stood with the StarNews marketing team at the base of the stands in Legion Stadium, taunting high school fans at the BB&T Jamboree with miniature, squishy foam footballs with StarNewsVarsity printed on the side.

Rarely does one get to experience the power of standing before thousands of people and possessing the one thing they all want.

I ignored the teenagers leaning over the railing, begging for a freebie. No, I thought, I decide how to distribute the footballs and I will throw them into crowded areas where people will knock each other down trying to catch a 60-cent football. I will chuck them high into the stands, into the top rows where people will be awed by my squishy football throwing accuracy.

OK, so a few balls missed their target areas. Somebody may have lost a drink in the process and I may have had to duck when that somebody retaliated by whizzing a squishy football back at me with superior accuracy and speed.

But that's irrelevant. The bottom line is that people love free stuff. They love collecting it, and they love competing for it. Some of us will proudly wear our Master Flow baseball cap to a restaurant simply because it was free.

Ezell and Ann Willard have built a business on that premise.

If anybody wants to put a logo on anything, the Willards can help. At the Welcome Show in early September at the Wilmington Convention Center, about 97 percent of the companies were selling coffee, 48 percent were selling food service products and 28 percent were selling microbrews. Then, there were the Willards. In their booth, everything was a prototype of something they sell.

They had plenty of promotional ink pens – on their web site, they sell more than 1,000 styles of pens, ranging from the Gala Plunger Action Pen (it's actually useless for unclogging toilets) to the Push-Pull Neck Pen (which has no chiropractic value whatsoever).

Pens, Ezzell said, used to be among the most popular items. Today, it's the beverage insulator, or beer huggie.

Ezzell wondered if that was a sign of the changing economy, and then pointed out that one particular huggie had a logo on the bottom. Whenever someone tips up a drink, the marketing campaign is still working.

The Willards also distribute mouse pad puzzles, collapsible flower vases and more than 1,000 types of stress relievers, from the Foam Kidney (buy two and donate one to a family member) to the Shark Horror Ball (squeeze it and watch the human body parts spill out of its mouth).

All these fun toys got me to thinking that I should order some I,40 promotional materials. I know I have plenty of pens and several huggies stashed in drawers. But I have noticed that sometimes my buns get cold. So I think I'm going to slap an I,40 logo on the 2-Slice Toaster & Bun Warmer and order them in bulk.

I can't wait to throw those into the stands at the next football jamboree.