....Let’s face it. Everyone would like to see their business’s logo, their company’s products, their organization’s mission and message splashed across the airwaves in an award-winning, critically acclaimed TV spot during the Super Bowl, Academy Awards, NCAA Basketball Tournament or some other program with millions of attentive viewers.

That would be pretty cool, right?

But in reality most of us probably don’t possess a Super Bowl-sized budget. Even if this is the case, you still need to come up with a promotion for next month’s product roll-out, trade show exhibit, direct-mail program or customer service/retention campaign that’ll make you look like a marketing genius and let you hang on to your job for another six months in today’s economically-challenged, “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” environment. In this frame of mind, promotional products can be viewed as quite the answer. We hope that you will let UltraService help you in the quest to stay afloat in the swift current of today's economy.

CPI = ROI

Consider for a minute the power of promotional products. You want to talk ROI (Return on Investment)? Let’s look at what in the ad biz is known as “cost-per-impression,” or CPI. A few head-turning examples:

Notepads: Recipients of a 50-sheet scratch pad will have a minimum of 50 exposures to the ad message written on it – each time they write something down, that’s one impression. And if the notes are passed on, the number of exposures can double or triple. The cost-per-impression for a $1 notepad would be $1 ÷ 50 sheets or 2¢ per impression.

Watches: A person looks at their watch an average of twice per hour. If you figure there are 16 waking hours in a normal day, they’ll see whatever is imprinted on the watch face 32 times. For a basic $12 watch, the CPI for just one day is only 37¢. Spread that out across the typical 3-year warranty period, and it works out to more than 35,000 impressions, a CPI of roughly three-hundredths of a cent.

Calendars: The recipient of a calendar will be exposed to the ad message on it 2-3 times a day at home or 5-6 times a day at the office. Using 4 exposures a day as an average (and multiplying that times 365 days in a year), we get 1,460 impressions. This makes the CPI for a $3 calendar a mere 0.2¢.

Playing Cards: During a 1-hour game of rummy or poker, players would be exposed to the message printed on the cards more than 500 times. At a cost of $2 a deck, the CPI works out to be just 0.4¢.

Mugs: The ad message on a coffee mug will be seen as often as 10 times a day, and mugs tend to be kept for years. For a $5 mug, the CPI would be roughly 0.2¢ over a mug’s two-year life span. And recipients hold the ad message in their hand and use it every day! Try getting that kind of targeted exposure with a TV spot.