So I have this memory from when I was younger of a TV ad for this weird flat flashlight that only blinks when you squeeze it, where a young guy uses it in a club to flirt with an attractive woman.

And I had never been able since to find any mention of such a product. No one seemed to have ever heard of it, or remembered the ad. This almost sounds like creepypasta, but it was just too goddamn goofy.

I finally just rediscovered the name, it was the Polaroid PolaPulse, and it came out in 1997.

I found this page at FlashlightMuseum.com, which allowed me to search and find this mention of the ad campaign at AdAge (apparently they were sold at Spice Girls concerts as SpiceLights?), and the holy grail, a copy of the ad at AdForum.

This is basically the product’s entire online presence, aside from a few threads looking for replacement batteries. I think you couldn’t even get replacement batteries at the time, it was purely disposable. They say it used the same batteries as powered the flash in old Polaroid cameras, so you can hack those in.

Honestly, reading those pages - check the comments at the museum site - it still sounds like creepypasta. But now that I know it actually existed, I’m absolutely convinced that this was part of a marketing experiment or hell, even a bet, to see how many units of an absolutely pointless product you could sell based on X dollars worth of ad buys.