For the second time in just a month, the ASA (Advertising Standards Agency) has banned a BT television ad due to misleading claims relating to its broadband speed. Earlier in August, their ‘infinity ad’ was banned by the ASA and just today, a TV ad featuring Love Actually actor Kris Marshall has been banned, which will be remembered by many as the one where an estate agent using a standard ADSL connection is hampered by low speeds, before a voice over claim that BT is now offering up to 20Mbps speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times.
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The World Cup is rapidly approaching and naturally as a football loving nation the anticipation is becoming very apparent in the UK. The sensationalism surrounding the World Cup is a blessing for advertisers and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks you’ve probably noticed the huge explosion in the number of football related ads being shown in printed and broadcasted media.

There are numerous special offers, giveaways and other promotional events related to the world cup being used by advertisers who are well aware that this is likely to give their sales a significant boost. Football related promotional gifts are especially popular at the moment and a number of companies are giving away all sorts of promotional gifts with a World Cup or football theme. This is an excellent way to bolster the effectiveness of an already highly valuable form of advertising. Promotional gifts are an exceptionally popular and effective marketing tool that is shown to have a lasting effect on potential customers. Combine this with a little World Cup fever and you’re left with a promotional medium that is likely to grasp the attention of would be customers and clients. Handing out items that fans can use to show their support such as noise makers and whistles that have been embellished with your company’s branding is an excellent way to make the most of this amazing advertising opportunity.

Promotional Pens

So, don’t miss out. Everybody else is shamelessly capitalising on the World Cup, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t either. A few football themed promotional pens might be all you need to give your business an extra boost during the build up to the World Cup.

Promotional Pens

New technology often presents new advertising opportunities. This was illustrated especially well by a trial that saw Bluetooth being used as an advertising medium by a branch of the fast food retailer Burger King located in Luton airport. A billboard that was enabled with Bluetooth contacted 20,000 people for the month it was installed and just over 2,000 of those contacted opted to download the vouchers and promotional information sent to their phones.

Unfortunately, the information about the trial does not indicate how many out of that 2,000 actually redeemed their vouchers, so it doesn’t really give a huge insight into how effective the campaign was; all it really tells us is that a percentage of people are willing to pay attention to a Bluetooth advertisement. Burger King was keen to highlight the fact that a customer in one of their Manchester stores attempted to redeem his Bluetooth voucher there. Although the voucher was not valid in that store it shows that offer stuck in that customer’s mind, just as a printed voucher would.

However, it seems that the ad was only really effective for a very small percentage of people and that perhaps it was not as effective as a more traditional campaign that would have made use of printed vouchers or promotional gifts such as promotional pens or printed t-shirts. Nevertheless, the trial does show that perhaps in the future there might be more scope for this type of advertising, but for the mean time it shouldn’t be the cornerstone of a company’s promotional campaign. Most people will remember promotional gifts, but Bluetooth vouchers may only really appeal to the more tech savvy consumer.

Printed T-Shirts

Last week saw the official request to dissolve parliament and so begin the long process of electing a new (or re-electing an old) government. Since then, local MPs and MPs in waiting have been hitting the streets of their constituencies with real menace, posting flyers, shaking hands and kissing babies. But what happens if someone doesn’t have a baby to kiss, how do you get through to them? Fortunately for all budding politicians, the realm of promotional gifts offers a plethora of different routes with which to connect and convince your electorate.

Elections are about ideas, and nothing cements and idea like a catchy slogan. Get your slogans plastered over a bunch of printed t-shirts and suddenly you have an easy way of your supporters to broadcast your ideas wherever they go. Promotional pens are also an inexpensive item to hand out while canvassing.

Slogan wise, this year seems to be the year of “Change” and “Fairness”, piggybacking on the success of our betters in the world of political-spin; the USA. Barack Obama’s campaign was a master class of marketing imagery which helped drive the slogans home even harder, with the now legendary and much satirised “brown-scale” pictures of Obama’s face becoming one of the great political images of the modern era. However, with one prominent member of the opposition already heavily lampooned over a doctored picture of himself, any ideas over that kind of iconography will probably be quietly dropped for the rest of the campaign.

Business Gifts

It has been reported that this year the amount of money being spent on online advertising will overtake the amount being spent on printed advertising for the first time ever. This is a clear sign for marketers that times are changing and businesses need to adapt the way they advertise in order to keep up with these changes.

Naturally your own business will have an advertising budget and the chances are a good portion of this will be spent on online advertising. However, simply because online marketing is becoming an increasingly dominant advertising format that doesn’t mean that you should neglect other methods of promotion.

If anything, online advertising becomes much more effective when used in conjunction with other methods such as the distribution of promotional gifts. It’s also important to question the effectiveness of online advertising. It’s certainly true that it allows you greater coverage, but as an internet user yourself you’ll also be aware that online adverts and considered a nuisance by many people who simply choose to ignore them. This simply isn’t the case with promotional gifts! They are hardly ever considered to be irritating; in fact most people would be thankfully to receive free business gifts such as promotional pens!

The fact that our lives our becoming increasingly dominated by the internet doesn’t mean that marketers should forget about advertising outside of cyber space. Next time you spend some cash on online marketing perhaps you should consider spending some of that budget on some promotional pens and compare the results!

Promotional Gifts

One of the beauties of using promotional gifts to advertise your business is their potential for subtly, which makes them suitable for advertising practically every kind of business. Take the example of a funeral parlour. Obviously, advertising for such a service must be discrete and a taking out an advertisement on a side of a bus would not be appropriate at all. By the same token neither would advertising on radio or television.

However, promotional gifts would be entirely suitable. For example, a plain simple, black pen could easily and tastefully be printed with the name and contact for a funeral director. These promotional pens could then be handed out to clients and would serve as an excellent, but subtle form of advertisement that wouldn’t cause offence to anyone.

This is one of the great advantages of using promotional gifts to advertise, they’re subtle! But this doesn’t mean they should be used in situations where there isn’t a necessity to be subtle. Even if you wanted to advertise something as brash as a theme park, then promotional gifts such as printed t-shirts or promotional pens could be used in conjunction with other forms of advertising too. It is this subtlety that makes promotional gifts such as effective form of advertising. A person who picked up a promotional pen from your business may put it away in a draw for months, but when they come to use it again they will be reminded of your services, possibly prompting them to make use of them again.

Eco FriendlyPromotional Gifts

Consumer fads come and go, but one noble cause which continues to grow is the concept of Fairtrade shopping. Fairtrade is an organisation that gives their logo to products and brands who are able to offer certain guarantees on the sourcing of ingredients and labour, and the environmental impact of their manufacturing processes. These guarantees normally revolve around things you would hope western companies would be committed to anyway, such as not using slave labour or the exploitation of children, but they also involve the somewhat controversial fixing of commodity prices to ensure small producers are not priced out of the market by larger competitors.

Currently, Fairtrade sales are up 12% on 2008, with Sainsbury’s the UK’s number one retailer of Fairtrade certified products, a market worth around £800m a year. This enduring trend of ethical shopping has admittedly come on the back of the longest run of economic prosperity in the post-war period, but it does point to a more considerate consumer conscience that you could do well to tap in to with your choice of promotional gifts.

Recycled Promotional Pens

For example, there are a wide range of eco-friendly promotional pens available, made from recycled plastics. There are also all kinds of promotional clothing items available made from 100% organically grown cotton, and even printed t-shirts made of bamboo that are fully bio-degradable. Even if you didn’t hear the last ten years of rallying calls for more ethical and sustainable business practises you can be sure that some of your customers did, and by utilising these kind of promotional items you will be showing that you are a company that is not only considerate to the planet, but is forward thinking in its approaches. Not a bad impression to make.

Promotional Gifts

Despite all the incredible special effects and witty writers large companies can employ to produce a multi-million pound Super Bowl advertisement, or how many glamorous they can retain to where/use/plug their product in public, marketing your product or service head to head with a competitor generally comes down to volume, meaning getting your brand in as many places, in as many ways as possible.

It can also be surprising in which industries you will find this applies, with even blockbuster Hollywood films, propelled by months of journalistic hype, interviews with cast and crew and fantastically expensive trailers, also purchasing warehouses full of promotional pens, hats and printed t-shirts to give away to fans and competition winners.

Promotional Pens

Hollywood also takes the concept of luxury promotional gifts to a… well, a completely Hollywood level. With little over two weeks to go until the 2010 Academy Awards, marketing and PR departments will already be gadding about preparing the infamous “Oscar baskets”. These are essentially hampers stuffed full of top of the range luxury watches, cosmetics, clothing and even electronic goods that are given to presenters, hosts and nominees in the hope that they will receive some positive publicity from the association. In fact is it not unheard of for top billing celebrities to make more through these marketing kickbacks than their actual appearance fee, most likely because the taxman never gets a sniff of these corporate gifts!

Promotional Pens

Although the MP expenses scandal, continued economic woes and now the Haiti earthquake have all done their best to distract us, 2010 is an election year. This normally means the ruling party stops running the country in favour of trying to save their own jobs, while all the opposition parties point out how badly the country is doing, scaring off much needed investment and depressing the rest of us.

It has been a few decades now since politicians in this country figured out that what you say is much less important than how you say it, and in a media-led world of 5 second attention spans it is just as much about leaving an impression as actually proposing anything useful or innovative. It is in this realm that promotional gifts come in to their own, where political parties go slogan man and race to brand as much of the urban sprawls and their inhabitants as possible. Politicians and campaigners go door to door handing out promotional pens and badges, with promotional car stickers available for people who like defacing their own property (“Honk for change”, suggest the Tories).

Promotional Bags

Promotional items are also a great fund raiser, with the Conservative Party offering all manner of branded merchandise for sale from the “Shop For Change” section of their website, including printed diaries and promotional bags. As yet none of the other major parties offer an equivalent selection of their own, but it would be interesting to see how a “Tea For Change” Tory mug and a Labour competitor would compare in a head to head brew-off. Most likely you would either find the brewing industry shut down from lack of government investment and the brew making communities abandoned, or two hundred laws being passed governing the tea brewing process, crippling any remaining brewing industry with red tape and health and safety legislation.

Whichever mug you choose, it always tastes the same in the end. Have a happy election!

Promotional Gifts

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) finally grew some teeth this week and threatened to suspend banking licenses for any firm not falling in line with its stringent new rules on employee bonuses. Banks and other financial institutions have come in for a rough ear bashing from the public, government and regulators alike over the last 18 months as everyone tried their hardest to deflect blame for the current economic crisis away from themselves. However, this is the first time they have actually been challenged to adopt reforms that they weren’t keen on themselves, and for once it appears the FSA isn’t likely to back down.

This will be causing some monumental headaches for human resources right across the City as they attempt to satisfy contractually certified bonuses for their staff without breaking the FSA’s new guidelines. Times like these are always trying for employee morale, and can leave many with a sour taste in their mouth over their perceived treatment by the company. So what better time than to try and butter everybody up with some promotional gifts? Sure, even the nicest looking promotional pens in the world aren’t going to cushion the disappointment of receiving 100% of your bonus in locked shares and bonds rather than cash, but for the poor souls having to write the letters and break the news a few corporate gifts here and there can make a world of difference.

Let’s face it, if you’ve just been let off the hook on having to honour millions of pounds worth of contractually required bonuses then you’re going to have a rouble or two spare to spend on the rest of your staff.