We receive a LOT of press releases about new products and services—tens of thousands of them over the course of a year. So we could be excused for thinking that we've seen every possible way to pitch new products ... until we received a message in our inbox titled "Ten Must-Have Products to Survive the Walking Dead."
The e-mail turned out to be a cleverly written product roundup from Larson Electronics, a supplier of industrial lighting for a variety of applications, including warehousing. Beneath the headline "What are your chances of surviving a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?"—plastered across an appropriately blood-red background—was an array of lighting products that would offer protection in case of an invasion like those in some recent horror films. Just two examples:
- "The HL-85-HID is an extremely rugged and powerful spotlight designed to provide maximum output with high reliability, making it the perfect tool to spot zombies before they see you in the distance. It has an adjustable light head that can be turned to produce a flood beam to see what's near or a spot beam to see at a distance. With a beam reaching distances of over 2,800 feet, hopefully you will have plenty of time to run! The HL-85-HID plugs into any abandoned car or truck you find."
- "Make sure to equip your prison home with our HALP-EMG-48-3L-LED emergency light fixtures. When the generators fail, these emergency battery-backup lights will provide light for 90 minutes after the power is lost. This gives all current survivors over an hour and a half to take cover and exit the building without fear of meeting face-to-face with a zombie in the dark."
