If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve probably handed out a branded pen or a logo mug at some point and wondered, somewhere in the back of your mind, whether any of it actually does anything. It’s a fair question, and as it turns out, somebody has been answering it with real data for twenty years now.
The Advertising Specialty Institute has been running its Global Ad Impressions Study since 2006, and the 2026 edition just came out. This year they surveyed thousands of consumers across the United States, Canada, Mexico and nearly two dozen European countries, asking how people really feel about the various kinds of advertising they encounter, and what makes them more inclined to do business with a company.
The answer, by a comfortable margin, was promotional products. Not the ads people pay good money to put on TV or all over the internet, but the humble logo water bottle. We’ll admit we weren’t exactly surprised, but the size of the gap is worth talking about.
People Actually Like Receiving Them
Let’s face it, most advertising has to fight its way in front of people. They skip it, block it, mute it, or scroll right past it without a second thought. So it says something that 75% of U.S. consumers reported having a positive opinion of promotional products, which ranked them first among every form of advertising tested, ahead of TV, internet, mobile and social media ads.
When you think about it, that makes perfect sense. A promotional product may be the only form of advertising that people genuinely thank you for. You hand someone something useful, they keep it, and your brand quietly tags along wherever they take it.
The Numbers Behind It
According to the study, the average promotional product generates around 3,300 impressions over its lifetime, and the average cost works out to about 6/10 of a cent per impression. Some categories do far better than that. A branded bag delivers close to 4,900 impressions at roughly a tenth of a cent each, and a fleece or jacket tops the entire study at 9,000.
Think about what that means in practice. You pay for the item once, and it goes right on advertising for you every time someone wears it to the gym, carries it through the airport, or sets it down on a conference table. There are no renewal fees to worry about, and no algorithm deciding whether your message gets seen this week. It’s just your logo, out in the world, doing its job for years.
Better still, all those impressions translate into genuine goodwill. 76% of U.S. consumers said they’d be more likely to do business with an advertiser after receiving a promotional item, and 78% said they’d view that advertiser more favorably. The numbers climb even higher in Canada and across Europe, where roughly nine in ten consumers said the same.
Choosing the Right Product Matters
One of the more useful things about the ASI study is that it breaks everything down by product category, so you can see which items get kept the longest, which get used most often, and which do the most to win people over.
Food gifts, for example, left 94% of recipients with a more favorable view of the advertiser, the highest mark in the whole study. Desk accessories and drinkware get used week after week, keeping a logo in someone’s line of sight nearly every day. And the humble pen, which costs next to nothing per impression, gets used daily by 64% of the people who receive one.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be digging into these categories one at a time, with the numbers behind each and some practical ideas for putting them to work at your business. If you’d like a head start, take some time to browse our full selection of promotional products. You’ll find something there for every budget, and chances are your customers will be glad you did.