Press Pass Five Star: Sales Material Bliss
As a former card company marketing guy, I’m a sucker for the ingenious piece of product-specific propaganda. You know, sales material.
For reasons we can all appreciate, high-quality, hand-crafted sales material is a lost art in the sports card universe these days. Every penny is more precious than ever before — and much better spent on improving the product itself than on the colorful literature produced to promote it. But every once in a while, a product comes along that requires something a little more extravagant than an attachment-filled email or a four-color one-sheet.
2010 Press Pass Five Star is one of those products.
In case you missed it, Press Pass Five Star is the envelope-pushing evolution of the high-end NASCAR card set; the bar-raising sequel to Press Pass‘ two-year-old Showcase product that’s so upscale it doesn’t have a suggested retail price. What it does have, in every five-card wooden box, is a base card numbered to 35 or less, a dual, triple quad or oversized memorabilia card numbered to 25 or less, a certified autograph card numbered to 35 or less, an autographed memorabilia card serial numbered to 50 or less and a Classic Compilations book card featuring either an autograph, a piece of memorabilia or both.
And because of all that, it also has one of the most cleverly conceived, excellently executed pieces of sales material to come along in years. With a simple tug of the pull tab, dealers, distributors and collectors fortunate enough to receive Five Star’s promotional prize will know instantly what the product is all about.
When the tab is tugged, five stars vanish from five die-cut windows to reveal some of the most colorfully premium patches racing collectors have ever seen. Meanwhile, the back of the piece details all the pertinent details of the product.
While we won’t know whether the product itself will live up to its name until Thanksgiving, Five Stars’ sales material is nothing short of extraordinary — and there’s something to be said for that.
Tracy Hackler is the editorial director for Beckett Media. Have a comment or question? Send an e-mail to him at thackler@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.
