If you are here to choose the next fine promotional item or corporate gift to put your amazing logo on, then I trust you already have some ideas on what type of promotional products suits your business best. But maybe you don’t, and other tabs of your browser are open in search for some other ways to reach your audience and develop your brandname fidelity? Well, who am I to convince you, and yes, a good branding and general marketing campaign would use several different forms of media. The question is how to allocate the advertising money in the most effective way. So, here come some stats on how most Americans and Canadians spend it. And some figures that explain why.

Advertising Specialty Institute reports that in 2006 advertising specialties and trade show giveaways industry sales rose another 5.3 percent. This makes an estimated total of $17.9 billion. It means that spending on promotional products was close to twice as large as online display advertising ($8.3 billion estimate), five times more than outdoor advertising ($3.5 billion estimate) and was also more than expenses on cable and satellite TV ads ($15.9 billion estimate). Additional research shows that all these little and big items imprinted with different company logos are not just some part of the advertising industry where people tend to spend substantial sums from their advertising budget; it’s also one of the most efficient ways to spend advertising money.

When it is spent on promotional items, recall rate is higher, long-lasting exposure is better, increase of company image and referrals and generation of business is also quite considerable. If you are not happy with just words, let me give you the numbers just for the first factor, recall rate. It’s 26% for Internet banner ads, 54.1% for ads that you meet in more traditional media, in newspapers, magazines, radio and on TV and when it comes to promo products recall rate raises to 77.1%. And if we mention that the people who were questioned about media ads recalled brands and logos from the last week, but when it came to promo items they would easily remember branded gifts they received a year ago. Impressive even for us at rushIMPRINT, though I’ve spent over 20 years working in this industry.