What a Branded Product Really Costs Per Impression
Every marketer knows what they pay for a Facebook or LinkedIn impression. Almost nobody knows what they pay for the impression a branded tote bag delivers over its life — even though, on the industry's own numbers, it's one of the cheapest ways to put a logo in front of a person. This report puts promotional products side by side with every major ad channel in the one unit buyers actually compare on: CPM, the cost to reach one thousand people. And because a fair comparison has to be honest about what an "impression" even is, we explain how each side counts them.
Calculate it for any product
Pick a product, adjust the price and lifetime impressions, and see the cost per impression, the CPM, and how it stacks up against paid channels. Every input is editable — test your own assumptions.
Impressions default to ASI 2026 methodology — editable. Channel CPMs are 2025–26 US benchmarks (see methodology). CPM alone doesn't measure impression quality — see the note below the calculator.
Promo vs every channel, at a glance
Below are 2025–2026 US CPM benchmarks for the major advertising channels, cheapest to most expensive. For reference, promotional products land roughly between $0.50 (a printed pen) and $9 (premium drinkware) per thousand impressions on the ASI methodology — meaning the cheapest promo beats everything here, and even mid-range promo undercuts most paid media.
| Channel | CPM | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Promotional products (range) | $0.50–$9.00 | physical |
| Programmatic display (GDN) | $3.12 | digital |
| Programmatic (open exchange) | $5.85 | digital |
| TikTok | $6.00 | digital |
| $8.00 | digital | |
| YouTube (in-stream) | $11.42 | digital |
| Radio (spot) | $12.00 | traditional |
| Meta (Facebook/Instagram) | $13.48 | digital |
| Magazine (national print) | $15.00 | traditional |
| CTV / streaming | $25.00 | traditional |
| Podcast | $27.00 | digital |
| Prime-time TV (linear) | $30.00 | traditional |
| $40.00 | digital |
But no impression is a clean number
Here's the part most "promo beats TV" pitches skip, and it's the part that actually matters. An impression is not a guaranteed set of eyeballs — on either side of this comparison. If you're going to compare CPMs, you have to know what each side is really counting.
What a digital impression actually is
Under the industry standard set by the Media Rating Council and IAB, a display ad counts as a "viewable" impression when just 50% of its pixels are on screen for a single continuous second (two seconds for video). That's it — half a banner, flashing past for one second, as someone scrolls, counts as a delivered impression you paid for. And "viewable" still doesn't mean "seen": the MRC is explicit that a viewable impression only means the ad had the opportunity to be seen — the person may have been looking somewhere else entirely. Historically, more than half of all served digital impressions failed to meet even that one-second bar.
What a promo impression actually is
The figures in this report come from ASI's Ad Impressions Study, which estimates a product's lifetime impressions by multiplying how long people keep it × how often they use it × how many people they're around while using it. That's a real, physical exposure — a tote carried through a grocery store, a mug on a desk seen by coworkers for months. It's a genuinely different kind of exposure from a one-second banner. But it's also an estimate, built partly on self-reported consumer surveys, and it counts every incidental glance. It is not a hard, measured number either.
So how should you read the comparison?
Honestly, and with both caveats in hand. A promo impression tends to be longer, more physical, and more trusted than a one-second banner — surveys consistently find people keep and value branded items, and recall the advertiser. But neither a promo impression nor a digital impression is a person who definitely absorbed your message. The right takeaway isn't "promo is 10× better." It's this: on a cost-to-be-present basis, promotional products are remarkably cheap and remarkably durable — and that's a real advantage — but you should weigh them alongside channels that offer targeting and measurement promo can't, not instead of them.
Methodology & sources
- Promo prices: typical bulk customer prices from our own catalog data across tens of thousands of products. Budget-tier, not quotes.
- Promo impressions: ASI 2026 Ad Impressions Study (US). Impressions = time kept × usage frequency × people contacted. Confirmed 2026 figures used where available (e.g., tote ≈ 5,000; outerwear ≈ 9,000); other categories use ASI-methodology estimates, editable in the calculator.
- Channel CPMs: 2025–2026 US benchmarks. Digital figures from Digital Applied Display & YouTube Benchmarks 2026, Sovran/Triple Whale 2025, and cross-industry 2026 ranges; traditional-media figures are broader industry estimates and marked as such.
- Viewability standard: MRC/IAB Viewable Ad Impression guidelines (50% of pixels for 1 second, display) and the MRC/IAB Attention Measurement Guidelines, November 2025.
- CPM = (price per unit ÷ lifetime impressions) × 1,000.
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