A story my dad (who wrote for various magazines in the 80s and 90s) used to tell:
> My friend Ken worked for what was then a first-tier Japanese hifi company. At the time -- it was the eighties -- companies exhibiting at CES gave shit away. Shirts, pens, calculators... you know: trade show crap. Rather than have his giveaway get lost in that sea of crap, my friend decided to give out pocket-sized mirrors, each encased in a blue silicon sleeve emblazoned with the company logo. His Japanese masters said "Ken-san, why you give away small mirror. We don't understand." And Ken-san said "trust me, they'll love it." And they did, because a) it was the eighties, and 2) while some preparatory activities are best done on a cardboard record jacket, others require an unyielding surface. I should add that the notion of including a single-edge razor blade in the package crossed his mind, but was rejected as being too on-the-nose.
I still wear T-shirts from vendors at tech conferences that I received years ago. They're durable, and they advertise the company not just to me but to others.
But perhaps the swag that has had the most staying power is stuff I could bring home for my kids to play with. I've gotten company-branded balls, puzzles, figurines, and other toys, and not only do they make a good "Guess what I brought home for you" surprise, but they sit around the house for ages, so you get a lot of exposure to their logos.
One thing I've never gotten as swag, but could see being a good ROI, would be a children's picture book, with a "Compliments of [Brand Name]" on it. With my kids, they would request that I read the same book to them 50+ times, so that's 50+ exposures to the brand.
The trap with shirts is that girls LOVE oversized, soft t-shirts as nightshirts. And since "unisex" shirts are often actually just men's-fit shirts, you have the double-whammy of a) give it to a guy, decent odds his partner steals it, and b) give it to a woman, good odds she doesn't want to wear it as a normal shirt (because "unisex"=men's) but it's a great night-shirt.
I got a Datadog t-shirt in 2016. Amazing quality. I have never worn it; it is my wife's favorite pajama shirt. She says the dog is cute.
...Dang maybe this is actually the master plan, though. I've seen datadog's logo like 50% of nights for the last 8 years.
The catch with t-shirts is they MUST be made of high-quality material. I've been handed so many promotional t-shirts where it's obvious they went with the lowest-cost supplier and they just feel awful on against my skin. Straight to the Goodwill with those.
I agree. The Gildan Heavyweight T-shirts are the kind you pick up at craft stores for $3-$4 a pop. But they tend to be stiff and too warm for my liking.
There are a variety of mid-level T-shirt brands (such as BELLA+CANVAS) that feel so much softer against the skin, no irritating seams, stand up to repeated washings, and are lighter-weight, meaning you can wear them as-is in the summer months, or under something else in the winter months, and it feels comfortable either way.
I think this goes for anything. I have dozens of water bottles from conferences. I use the Yeti and some of the other nice ones. All the no-name stuff that feels cheap and smells like chemicals… never used them once.
100% High quality t-shirts are a must, anything else gets used as a wash rag. Bonus points if the design isn't too corporate, and logs are a side affect.
My favorite t-shirt to this day is a Chef t-shirt I got at a conference.
why not straight to the trash. why would you feel that some article of clothing that is so poorly made that you refuse to wear it should be foisted upon someone else? this just feels like you trying to make yourself feel good without actually doing any good.
I actually have gotten a children’s picture book from a brand of cloth diapers that describes a silly and exaggerated story of how they invented their core product (a pivot from the two founders’ masters degrees in aerospace engineering). It is, as you suspected, very effective marketing as it is now seared into my brain from many re-readings.
My son was gifted a toolset by his aunt and uncle for Christmas. Plastic tools, belt etc...and a little voice box which every 3rd press or so extolls the virtues of John Deere tractors.
Those slogans are now going to be stuck in my brain forever, so I've got to hand it to them (no one realised it did this before they got it).
About 6-7 years ago, I attended a hacker convention and of course I made the rounds to pick up swag.
American Express had brought a limited supply of fidget spinners, and they were in extremely high demand. I was unable to secure one of my own.
PayPal had the best cache of stuff. They had this earphone holder that was designed like a fishbone. You were supposed to wrap the cord around the "ribs". Then I also picked up a shirt that said on the back "report phishing attempts to phishing@paypal.com".
I wore the shirt in public and a woman accosted me at a bus stop. She asked me if I worked for PayPal, which I denied. Then she told me anyway about some dispute she had. I decided to stop wearing the shirt and other swag that wasn't directly related to me.
All merchandise is commercial. Do your kids wear a Nike swoosh t shirt? Okay on an iPad? Love Lego? What the difference if it's a Microsoft football or new relic slingshot (all things I see from where I'm sitting)?
I used to get all sorts of medically-branded pens and merchandise courtesy of my parents. I had an infinite supply of pens.
Years later, I was working as a nurse on a medical floor. I had a realization that I was filling out an IV med label for Avelox with an Avelox-branded pen.
Whats wrong with that? Kids play with anything, wooden stick is a great toy anytime for example. That there are some logos and not some other logos or pictures they couldn't care less about
Mom's a nurse, so we grew up with about everything in the house being branded drug merch. The diflucan dolphin beanie toy is probably my favorite. As an adult, I wish she had brought home Viagra swag. They gave out some hilarious stuff.
The only swag I am comfortable with wearing in public are things that look like it might just be a [sweater] with a cool image on it. No way I’m walking around with “Castiron ᴀʟʟ ʏᴏᴜʀ ɪʀᴏɴ ɴᴇᴇᴅs sɪɴᴄᴇ 1887” on my torso.
I detest branded clothing. why should I be paying a company to advertise for them? LV, Boss, etc. I know for most they want to show off the logos hoping it makee them look like they have taste and/or money. It's crazy to me tho. Some of the designs are atrocious
more on topic though. You know the there are branded children's book right?
Very age dependent but my toddler son loved the CNCF animal logo plushies. They got tons of use and did not feel wasteful like the direct to landfill stuff I’ve gotten at so many conferences.
I think the best piece of swag I ever got was a high-quality fidget spinner from Pluralsight. Even though fidget spinners were a fad, they're still pretty cool to have around. That one from the conference is still around in our house somewhere, and people still play with it.
I've also brought home so much garbage, that was fun to play with for a couple minutes but either broke or had no lasting interest. If you're in charge of choosing swag, please think about whether it has any lasting value. It does say something about your company's values and follow-through.
I would agree with the other comment: commercial merch is dystopian. This month I finally disposed of my simple, black HP (not HPE) T-shirt. It is truly dystopian what the current merch doesn't hold up for.. does a quick 24 - 08 math .. 16 years!
I learned, quite by accident, that carrying around several boxes of the small Cadbury's Flake chocolate around a conference in Las Vegas was an amazing ice breaker to conversation. From there, the next game developer's conference, I dropped about $400 on custom printed sleeves for small Toblerone chocolate bars that I could give away. I've also always carried a different style of high quality business cards from everyone else, so that also became a conversation starter (about $150). I've also done a glossy magazine for my video game company showing off our achievements and projects for the past year (about $2,000). And a pop-up book of projects ($1,500). And a high-quality custom Rubik's cube (about $4 each). And a colouring book with branded crayons (about $1,200). Custom phone cases. Custom phone chargers. Custom USB cords. Custom tools for network admins. Ribbons for conference badges. High-quality tape measures. Custom branded private blend coffee beans. LEGO in our own custom branded box. Digital single-game "game & watch" style toys. So many different toys that endure. Toys seem to always go over well. All those tiny marketing promotions break the ice and have lead to several successful business deals.
What vendor did you use to make the pop up book? I work in medical research and I could see that being a great learning tool to train our sites on the lab kits.
Here's one you wouldn't think of: Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) wrote about his radical diet that took off 100 pounds, and kept it off. It ends in a regular vegan-type diet, except he's allowed to take days off now and then.
Anyway: for the first two weeks it starts with eating only potatoes. No butter, no sour cream, no fat. Then other foods get added in.
Here's the giveaway part: he would go to show business parties and say to people, "Would you like a potato?" He claims a lot of people would say, "A potato? Sure!"
We give away potatoes to trick or treaters on Halloween. They are immensely popular and we’ve become known as the potato house in our city’s Facebook groups. The weird delight on the faces of kids of all ages was hugely unexpected but surprisingly consistent.
When I lived in Santa Cruz back in the early 2000s I lived in a duplex, and my duplex neighbour and I would cook and give away well over three 30lb bags of baked potatoes each Halloween. Bake the potatoes early in the day, cut them open, put in the butter, salt and pepper, then close them up and wrap in tin foil. Kids and teenagers would go out of their way to get a potato from us.
One early 90s Comdex, some company gave out 4' fiberglass rods with Beatings will continue until morale improves on them. I have no clue what the company did (something with printing, maybe), but everybody in Vegas was carrying one. I kept it for years in the corner of my office.
As someone who’s the owner of a national conference business my tip is branded chargers. Literally everyone needs them and is incentivized to keep it around.
I have a SUSE power strip (1-plug-to-3) that I pull out at airports when everyone is contending for outlets - very popular move. I have a little bag with pouches for chargers and adapters.
Really anything that is handy for business travelers is going to land well with a lot of people at conferences.
Definitely a popular item, though in certain markets (like HNers), there may be considerable hesitation to plug a phone/computer with sensitive business info into a charger of unknown provenance.
I used to take these but no longer do, since I don’t want to risk any shenanigans anywhere in the supply chain.
Is it still the case though? I am very picky about my chargers nowadays, doesn’t take much savvy to realize a top of the line charger will juice your phone much faster than some freebie. Unless you’re handing out multiport anker GaN chargers in which case tell me where you’re heading next lol.
Those little USB-A to C/mini/Lightning adapters are gold, and I'm up to like 6 of them now, all get regular use. They can't be as expensive as a shirt or some of the other knick-knacks.
Otherwise, stress balls and bouncy balls are always a hit to bring home and give to the kids.
Anything travel related probably, as a good number of people will have traveled to the conference, and will likely travel to other conferences and will take the banded thing with them. Where it's probably even seen by the correct audience.
We had a very interesting and successful run with branded BBQ tongues. They are very cheap, unassuming and large enough that you could see them sticking out of bags here and there.
It was by far the oddest giveaway at that conference. The 13th pen just doesn't yield any reaction at all. The tongues were a bit of a conversation starter.
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> My friend Ken worked for what was then a first-tier Japanese hifi company. At the time -- it was the eighties -- companies exhibiting at CES gave shit away. Shirts, pens, calculators... you know: trade show crap. Rather than have his giveaway get lost in that sea of crap, my friend decided to give out pocket-sized mirrors, each encased in a blue silicon sleeve emblazoned with the company logo. His Japanese masters said "Ken-san, why you give away small mirror. We don't understand." And Ken-san said "trust me, they'll love it." And they did, because a) it was the eighties, and 2) while some preparatory activities are best done on a cardboard record jacket, others require an unyielding surface. I should add that the notion of including a single-edge razor blade in the package crossed his mind, but was rejected as being too on-the-nose.
But perhaps the swag that has had the most staying power is stuff I could bring home for my kids to play with. I've gotten company-branded balls, puzzles, figurines, and other toys, and not only do they make a good "Guess what I brought home for you" surprise, but they sit around the house for ages, so you get a lot of exposure to their logos.
One thing I've never gotten as swag, but could see being a good ROI, would be a children's picture book, with a "Compliments of [Brand Name]" on it. With my kids, they would request that I read the same book to them 50+ times, so that's 50+ exposures to the brand.
I got a Datadog t-shirt in 2016. Amazing quality. I have never worn it; it is my wife's favorite pajama shirt. She says the dog is cute.
...Dang maybe this is actually the master plan, though. I've seen datadog's logo like 50% of nights for the last 8 years.
I did get some funny looks asking for a (women's) small instead of large, but gotta bring home the goods.
There are a variety of mid-level T-shirt brands (such as BELLA+CANVAS) that feel so much softer against the skin, no irritating seams, stand up to repeated washings, and are lighter-weight, meaning you can wear them as-is in the summer months, or under something else in the winter months, and it feels comfortable either way.
My favorite t-shirt to this day is a Chef t-shirt I got at a conference.
Those slogans are now going to be stuck in my brain forever, so I've got to hand it to them (no one realised it did this before they got it).
American Express had brought a limited supply of fidget spinners, and they were in extremely high demand. I was unable to secure one of my own.
PayPal had the best cache of stuff. They had this earphone holder that was designed like a fishbone. You were supposed to wrap the cord around the "ribs". Then I also picked up a shirt that said on the back "report phishing attempts to phishing@paypal.com".
I wore the shirt in public and a woman accosted me at a bus stop. She asked me if I worked for PayPal, which I denied. Then she told me anyway about some dispute she had. I decided to stop wearing the shirt and other swag that wasn't directly related to me.
Years later, I was working as a nurse on a medical floor. I had a realization that I was filling out an IV med label for Avelox with an Avelox-branded pen.
more on topic though. You know the there are branded children's book right?
Example: https://www.amazon.com/Ms-Brand-Counting-Book/dp/0881068543
I've also brought home so much garbage, that was fun to play with for a couple minutes but either broke or had no lasting interest. If you're in charge of choosing swag, please think about whether it has any lasting value. It does say something about your company's values and follow-through.
I get that others like them, it's just not for me.
I don't know the story behind this or how many were actually printed, but Microsoft seems to have tried it:
https://archive.org/details/mommybook
We're all digital serfs anyway, enslaved by subscriptions and work for hire - might as well get something back for it.
Anyway: for the first two weeks it starts with eating only potatoes. No butter, no sour cream, no fat. Then other foods get added in.
Here's the giveaway part: he would go to show business parties and say to people, "Would you like a potato?" He claims a lot of people would say, "A potato? Sure!"
https://www.amazon.com/Presto-Pounds-Disappear-Other-Magical...
Really anything that is handy for business travelers is going to land well with a lot of people at conferences.
I used to take these but no longer do, since I don’t want to risk any shenanigans anywhere in the supply chain.
Otherwise, stress balls and bouncy balls are always a hit to bring home and give to the kids.
It was by far the oddest giveaway at that conference. The 13th pen just doesn't yield any reaction at all. The tongues were a bit of a conversation starter.