Bringing Bunny Heads to Harvard

Do you secretly (or not so secretly) hope to someday master the debonair swagger perfected by the legendary Hef? A new job opening on campus should pique your interest.

First established in 1997, the Playboy-On-Campus (POC) Representative program asks undergrads to serve as connections between the magazine and their college campuses and to promote Playboy’s products.

Plus, you get a lot of free porn.

“This semester we started out with a magazine give-out,” says Daniel J. Perez, manager of Playboy’s Events and College Marketing department, which has begun sending each campus rep 100 copies of each month’s issue for distribution.

“[We want the college reps to] give them to the frat houses, give them to their friends.”

The college reps also help promote various Playboy events and foster word-of-mouth buzz. One such program is the Campus Bar of the Month, which features popular campus bars from such colleges as Wisconsin, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT and most recently BU, on the POC website.

“It’s great for the bar and great for the campus,” Perez says.

But though Perez was enthusiastic about the program, he does admit that it is better suited for larger colleges.

“Ohio State, the Floridas, the Michigans...they have a lot more requests [for promotions],” Perez says.

Indeed, Harvard’s campus rep from fall 2003 to spring 2004—who asked not to be identified because he said he was embarrassed about the job—found it difficult to increase the size of the program. However, he believes that his role at Harvard was still important in connecting with campus groups such as H Bomb, a magazine he said Playboy was very interested in.

“We did have a full-page ad for Playboy [in our spring issue],” H Bomb editor-in-chief Katharina P. Cieplak-von Baldegg ’06 writes in an e-mail. “They recently asked for permission to print an image from the magazine with a mention of H Bomb for their ‘Year in Sex’ for the January issue.”

And Perez says that since the campus reps aren’t paid, a lot of what they do comes in part from their own initiative.

“I can tell you off the top of my head,” Perez says, that last year’s rep “didn’t do a lot of stuff.”

And considering the short length of the application, it appears that you can turn ten minutes of procrastination to get 100 free issues of Playboy every month. Could be worse.