Promotional Products vs Digital Ads: What UK Consumers Prefer (2026)

Think about the last advertisement that left you feeling warmly towards a brand. The odds are it wasn’t a pop-up you dismissed, a pre-roll you skipped the instant the button appeared, or a promoted post you thumbed past on the way to something you’d chosen to see. Most modern advertising is something we endure rather than enjoy, which is precisely why the newest figures from the ASI Global Advertising Impressions Study 2026/2027 are worth a marketer’s attention.

The study asked consumers a refreshingly blunt question: across every major advertising format, which do you actually view positively? Not which you remember, or tolerate, but which earns genuine goodwill. Promotional products came first, ahead of internet advertising, television, social media and mobile. For UK businesses deciding where the next marketing pound should go, that ranking reframes what branded merchandise is really for.

The ranking: where promotional products sit against digital

When ASI lined the formats up by how positively consumers regard them, the order was unambiguous.

1. Promotional products — the most positively viewed format of all, with 78% of UK consumers (79% internationally) rating them more favourably than other advertising
2. Internet advertising
3. Television advertising
4. Social media advertising
5. Mobile advertising

Read that again, because it upends the usual hierarchy. The two formats that dominate most marketing budgets, digital and social, sit second and fourth on the list of what people actually like. A tangible, branded object, the format many firms treat as an afterthought, sits at the top. It’s not that the digital channels don’t work; it’s that consumers don’t feel anything warm towards them. And feeling, as any brand-builder knows, is where preference and loyalty are made.

Why “welcomed” beats “interruptive”

The reason is baked into how each format behaves. Digital and mobile advertising interrupt. They arrive uninvited, mid-scroll or mid-video, and ask for a slice of attention you were spending on something else. We’ve built an entire set of reflexes to repel them: ad-blockers, skip buttons, banner blindness, the practised flick of a thumb. The advertising industry spends fortunes buying attention that the audience is actively trying not to give.

A promotional product does the opposite. It doesn’t interrupt anything. It gives something first, a useful object with no strings attached, and lets the goodwill follow. That’s why 76% of consumers keep the items they’re given simply because they’re useful to have, and why the act of receiving one leaves 97% of UK consumers with a more favourable impression of the advertiser. Nobody has ever installed a blocker to keep a decent water bottle out of their kitchen.

The exposure that doesn’t cost you twice

There’s a second advantage that the ranking hints at but doesn’t spell out: longevity. A digital impression is gone the moment the page scrolls or the video ends; you paid for a heartbeat of attention. A branded fleece, tote or notebook stays in someone’s life for months, sometimes years, quietly repeating your name every time it’s picked up, worn or passed to a colleague. One outlay, a long tail of unpaid exposure.

This is the mechanism behind promotional products’ reputation for one of the lowest costs-per-impression in the entire media mix. (The International edition of the ASI study doesn’t publish UK-specific cost-per-impression figures, so we won’t invent one, but the logic is hard to argue with: an item that’s used daily for a year is working long after a paid digital campaign has ended.) We put that idea to the test in our look at how custom clip pens stack up against social ads on ROI, and the sums are more flattering to merchandise than most marketers expect.

This isn’t promo versus digital. It’s promo with digital

None of this is an argument for tearing up your media plan. Digital advertising does things a branded bottle never could: it reaches vast audiences in seconds, targets with surgical precision, and measures every click. Those are real strengths, and the reason it commands the budgets it does.

The smarter reading of the ASI ranking is that promotional products and digital advertising are good at opposite things. Digital buys attention; merchandise keeps it. Digital is a spike; merchandise is a slow burn. The most effective campaigns use them in concert, digital to reach and target, a physical product to convert that fleeting attention into something people hold, use and feel warmly about. Print a QR code or a short URL on the merchandise and you’ve built a bridge back to the measurable, trackable digital world, giving you the best of both.

What UK marketers should take from this

• Stop treating merchandise as the poor relation of the media plan. It’s the one format consumers rank above everything else. Budget it accordingly, rather than scraping it together from what’s left.
• Use it where affinity matters most. Events, onboarding, client gifting, thank-yous and loyalty are exactly the moments where a warmly received object outperforms another impression bought at auction.
• Choose useful over clever. The 76% who keep items because they’re useful are telling you where the value sits. Pick products people would happily own, and the goodwill takes care of itself, a pattern that runs right through how the UK compares to the rest of Europe.
• Build a digital bridge. A QR code or campaign URL on the product connects its long, offline life back to the analytics you can actually measure.

The bottom line

Digital advertising has spent two decades winning the argument on reach and measurement, and it deserves its place. But when you ask consumers which advertising they actually welcome, the answer is the same one the industry keeps under-investing in. Promotional products top the list, not because they shout loudest, but because they’re the only format that gives before it asks. In a world of skipped, blocked and scrolled-past ads, that turns out to be a rare and valuable thing.

Frequently asked questions

Source: Research provided by the Advertising Specialty Institute, ©2026, All Rights Reserved. Report: ASI Global Advertising Impressions Study 2026/2027 (International edition). Channel-preference rankings and UK figures are drawn from the study.