Selling Barack Obama memorabilia has been a lucrative business and he’s not even President yet!  Everyone from souvenir sellers to student activists and from national newspapers to the American ‘souvenir empire’ the Franklin Mint has made much money from images of America’s next president.

‘We found that merchandising efforts during the campaign were successful, that people were so enthusiastic and they wanted to have a little piece of history,’ said Linda Douglass, speaking for the Obama inaugural committee which is organising promotional products from T-shirts to mouse mats to bumper stickers to sell in the run up to the inauguration.

In Brazil, many businesses take part in the Warm Winter Campaign, which gets employees to give blankets, hats, scarves and jackets which are then donated to the needy.  Each company usually creates its own posters to remind staff that the Campaign is running. But this year a Brazilian TV network called SBT took a different route. It commissioned promotional clothing such as hats, scarves and sweatshirts with the campaign message printed right onto the clothing. Then it put the items around the company HQ, hanging scarves on coatstands and pinning sweatshirts up in the cafeteria, with a label underneath saying ‘This advertisement will be donated to the 2008 Warm Winter Campaign. Support it too’. People going outside the company were encouraged to wear the hats. Over 1,000 items of clothing were collected throughout the campaign’s duration and as the original promotional materials were donated too, the promotional budget actually contributed to the good cause, creating a great PR buzz that became international news, for no extra cost.

Barack Obama image courtesy of transplanted mountaineer at Flickr under a creative commons licence

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