Hall of Fame | Must Read So, when the Philadelphia native graduated from Temple University with a communications degree and accepted a copywriter job at a place called Advertising Specialty Institute in 1981, she thought she’d “died and gone to heaven.” Sokalski was thrilled to be writing magazine ads, but she was also kept busy providing catalog descriptions to those advertising specialties, otherwise known as promotional products. Mugs. Pens. Grandfather clocks. Knives. Ashtrays. She wrote about all of them. She could tell you how many dimples were on a golf ball (“between 300 and 450”). “It was the perfect storm of growth,” Sokalski says. “The industry was growing. The company was growing. They couldn’t hire people fast enough. I would do anything they asked me to do.” In just three years, Sokalski rose from copywriter to director of marketing and advertising. “It was a wonderland for me,” Sokalski says. Her knowledge of the industry had been growing, but it was her creativity that the industry would come to covet over the following decades. Harnessing a Superpower While running the marketing and advertising for ASI, Sokalski realized something about her place within the promotional products world of distributors and suppliers. “I had a superpower that other people didn’t,” Sokalski says. That superpower? Creative marketing. The beauty and allure of promotional products is that they have worked as a marketing tool for generations. The creativity comes in the type of product that is offered, and the product does the marketing for the client. In the ’90s, Sokalski made some key observations about the companies around her. Very few suppliers had marketing departments or employed creative thinkers. And even the largest distributors consisted mostly of salespeople. They didn’t have time to market their companies the way Sokalski would have considered effective. And to her, effectiveness usually was found outside the box. When ASI was introducing a new service and they had trouble reaching the people they wanted, Sokalski took the reins. She sent them each a watermelon and wrote how “delicious” the new offer would be right on the watermelon. The strategy had a 100% recall rate and a 92% conversion rate. She was marketing ASI so effectively that she decided she could teach the industry a thing or two, and PPAI agreed, helping her hold seminars on various marketing topics. Press releases. Creative direct-to-mail campaigns. How to do market research. How to market your company on a smaller budget. Promo companies could take the information for themselves or pass it along to their clients. “I had packed houses,” Sokalski says. “I had waiting lines to get into the seminars.” Daryll H. Griffin, president of Accolades Inc., who nominated Sokalski for the PPAI Hall of Fame, remembers attending her first Sokalski session, not knowing anything about her and then seeking out the sessions from that point forward. “Always invigorating, always innovative, always creative, always professional, always amazing,” Griffin says. “Mary Ellen is the queen of creativity.” ‘If It’s Not a Wow, It’s Not a Go’ If her initial role at ASI acquainted Sokalski with the promo industry, then her memorable educational sessions and marketing strategies acquainted the promo industry with her. It was only a matter of time until promo companies began realizing that, rather than simply attending those sessions for “It was the perfect storm of growth. The industry was growing. The company was growing. They couldn’t hire people fast enough. I would do anything they asked me to do.” PPAI • JANUARY 2023 • 67
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