Who wouldn’t love receiving magic balls as a promotional item? Magic 8 balls, to be exact! These toys are iconic mid-20th-century nostalgic pieces that will probably leave a smile on most people’s faces.
If you’re looking for a fun, unconventional promotional item for your business, a custom magic 8 ball could be perfect. They’d be almost universally accepted and are an item people will keep around instead of tossing out.
Keep reading to learn more about magic 8 balls and four ideas for using them as custom promotional items.
What Is A Magic 8 Ball?
For those who’ve yet to encounter one, a magic 8 ball is an oversized billiard ball resembling the black number eight pool ball. The catch is that the underside of a magic 8 ball has a little screen, which reveals a chamber containing dark ink and a white polyhedral die with answers to questions written on each face.
The toy is often used for fortune-telling games, asking random questions, or decision-making. You give the ball a query, shake it, turn it upside down to reveal the transparent screen, and then it shows a random answer from the die within.
These toys remained popular for decades after their initial release in the mid-20th century. They’re still around today, often kept around homes as pieces of nostalgia, for games, or to use for fun when asking random questions. Although not as sought after as they once may have been, most would happily accept one as a promotional item.
Using Magic 8 Balls As Promotional Items
Events and conferences often hand out various promotional items to guests and other attendees. Branded tote bags, pens, pencil cases, rulers, mugs, water bottles, and other small trinkets are examples of the most common promotional items. They’re useful but don’t really stand out from the crowd.
Magic 8 balls, with their nostalgic appeal, make excellent promotional items to hand out at events. You can have them custom-made with your brand logo and colors and, if desired, even have custom answers. These will surely draw some extra attention to your brand at events.
With promotional intent in mind, you could leave some out for anyone to take. They’d be taking with them a constant reminder of your brand, which could be a beneficial marketing outcome. However, it’d be a good idea to limit the number of freely available magic 8 balls and hand them out individually instead.
4 Things To Put In A Custom Magic 8 Ball
1. Leave The Default Answers
Magic 8 balls are loved for their classic responses. If you don’t have any specific idea for the ball’s answers, consider leaving them default. You can still have the ball’s body branded—the most visible part of the toy.
2. Number It
The decision-making dice inside a magic 8 ball is a 20-sided die. The ball could be a random number picker or used for making decisions. People could use it to guess the number that will appear, make bets, decide who’s going on a food run, or anything else. You can do a lot with 20 numbers.
Coincidentally, a 20-sided die, or a d20, is widely used for many tabletop role-playing games. And many who play them enjoy collecting unique dice for their games. This might even help your business attract more attention at events.
3. Make It A Die
Of course, you could make it a normal die with numbers from one to six. There’d be two additional spaces left on a 20-sided polyhedral die, which can be left blank or say a message like ‘roll again’ or ‘try again.’
4. Company-Specific Messages
If you’re getting these custom magic 8 balls to promote your business, they might as well have customized answers that relate to your business. For example, decision-making answers would be perfect for a company that revolves around helping other businesses make intelligent decisions for the future. Alternatively, answers in the form of science jokes could make a great promotional piece for the appropriate company. If you’re in the food or beverage business, you can put your offerings on each side and make the magic 8 ball a fun way for people to order.
That said, company-specific messages must exist in a grey area. You want it to be relevant to your business. But you also want it to be general enough that people can still use it when they get home. Most importantly, it must be versatile enough that recipients will use it in the future.
Conclusion
Custom magic 8 balls can be effective promotional items with a well-planned design and fun messages or answers. A solid promotional product is something the recipient wants to take home, use, and keep around the house. It should also show your business’s name, logo, or branding. This design reminds people that your business exists. And a magic 8 ball, branded with your logo and customized to have fun or helpful answers, can be exactly that!
