Digital Ad Spend Vs Branded Merchandise: What You Get For Your Money

Every marketing budget review reaches the same moment. Digital spend is a measurable, so it gets defended with numbers. Merchandise spend is harder to justify, so it gets described as brand building and is often the first to face budget cuts.

That is a reporting problem rather than a performance problem. This guide sets out what the published research actually says about the cost of a branded merchandise impression, what a digital impression costs in B2B, why the two are not directly comparable, and how to measure merchandise well enough to defend it properly.

Start with the caveat

An impression from a branded fleece and an impression from a display ad are not the same unit. One is a served ad, counted whether or not anyone registered it. The other is a modelled estimate of how many times a physical object was seen over its life, based on survey data. Anyone claiming a clean like-for-like comparison is overstating it. It’s a lot harder to compare.

What the comparison is genuinely useful for is order of magnitude. The gap between the two is large enough that the methodological fuzziness does not close it.

What the research says about merchandise

The 2026 ASI Global Advertising Impressions Study surveyed nearly 5,000 consumers across the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Its headline findings:

• A typical promotional product generates around 3,300 brand views over its lifetime
• The average cost per impression across promotional products is $0.006, six-tenths of a cent
• A $6 tote bag generates roughly 5,000 impressions, giving a cost per impression of about $0.001
• Premium items such as fleece average $0.004 per impression or less, because they generate thousands of impressions over a long life
• 85% of consumers remember the advertiser who gave them a logoed product
• 78% keep promotional products because they find them useful
• 76% say they are more likely to do business with a brand that gave them branded merchandise
• 78% view a brand more favourably after receiving a promotional item

The study also found that promotional products outranked television and digital as consumers’ preferred advertising channel. Figures are quoted in US dollars because that is how the study reports them.

Worth noting on the sustainability side: joint ASI and PPAI research found that promotional products deliver brand recall with a carbon impact per memorised impression around eight times smaller than digital advertising. If you have carbon reporting obligations, that is a more interesting number than it first appears.

What the research says about B2B digital

Published 2026 benchmarks for B2B digital advertising vary enormously depending on sector, geography and how narrowly you target. Broad ranges from several sources:

• LinkedIn CPM commonly falls somewhere between $30 and $60 per thousand impressions for typical B2B targeting, which works out at roughly $0.03 to $0.06 per impression
• Narrow targeting pushes it considerably higher. Senior-title, large-company audiences are frequently quoted well above that, and ultra-narrow audiences higher again
• LinkedIn CPC benchmarks generally sit around $5 to $12, with financial services, SaaS and technology at the upper end
• Cost per lead ranges are wide, commonly quoted between $50 and $200

These are ranges rather than facts about your account. Your own historical data beats any published benchmark, and if you are running paid campaigns you already have better numbers than these.

The comparison, with its limitations attached

The honest summary: digital wins on precision, speed and attribution. Merchandise wins on cost per impression, duration and the fact that people keep it voluntarily. They are complements, and the argument for treating them as competitors is mostly an artefact of how budgets are structured.

Where merchandise genuinely loses

• It cannot be targeted at people you have no route to. No merchandise programme reaches a cold list. Digital does.
• It cannot be turned off. A bad creative decision in a paid campaign is a wasted week. A bad merchandise decision is 2,000 units in a warehouse.
• It cannot be A/B tested at any sensible cost.
• It has a lead time. Reactive campaigns are digital’s territory. Long leads times can mean you’re too late. 

Any case for merchandise that skips these is not a case, it is a pitch.

How to measure merchandise properly

Merchandise attribution is weak by default, not by necessity. Most of the gap is a measurement design problem.

• Model your own cost per impression using your actual unit costs and a defensible view of item lifespan. A £4 notebook used daily for a year is a very different number from a £4 pen lost in a fortnight, and modelling it yourself is more persuasive than quoting an industry average.
• Use unique codes or QR destinations per item, per campaign or per event, so you can attribute traffic and enquiries to the item rather than to “brand”.
• Track redemption rather than distribution. How many kits were claimed matters more than how many were shipped.
• Pull data from your webshop. A corporate webshop gives you order-level data by department, region and item, which is the closest thing merchandise has to campaign reporting.
• Survey recipients occasionally. Two questions to a sample of recipients six months after distribution tells you whether items are still in use, which is the entire basis of the cost per impression case.
• Track cost per retained item, not cost per unit. An item nobody keeps has an infinite cost per impression, whatever it cost to buy.

How JSM runs this for a client

How to split the budget

There is no correct ratio, and anyone offering one is guessing. A more useful way to think about it:

FAQs

Want to see the numbers for your own programme?

We will help you model cost per impression on your actual range and build measurement into your next campaign.

Download our ROI whitepaper