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Your AD-TECH representative listens to different types of business throughout the country and can help you find the problem and insure that your future specialty advertising programs are successful and profitable for you.

AD-TECH understands the importance of quality when representing your business to your hard-earned customers. Other companies that are happy to offer lower prices are also happy to apologize for the low quality. The best products & service staff back up AD-TECH representatives in the business. (Quality isn't expensive, it's priceless!) Most of all, all of us associated with AD-TCH love what we do and know that a successful specialty advertising program will begin a long and profitable relationship between your business and ours.

Industry
A successful manufacturer once said that he sold 1 million quarter-inch drill bits to people who didn't want drill bits at all. What they wanted were quarter-inch holes. Business people bought $7 billion dollars worth of promotional products last year, but they weren't looking for promotional products per se. What they wanted were results. Those promotional products were the drill bits that gave them the increased revenue, store traffic, booth traffic, motivated employees, raised funds, sales leads, better shelf space, better customer relations, etc., that they were looking for.

Promotional products make up an industry you probably didn't know existed, yet have been surrounded with most, if not, all of your life. Look over your desk - see anything with a logo on it anywhere? Check out those pens. Your calendar? Your coffee cup? Chances are you'll find more than one item you've been given with a logo or slogan on it. And at home you likely have more than one T-shirt, key-tag or refrigerator magnet reminding you of someone's business. All of these things are promotional products.

1889 . . . One of the earliest ad specialties to become a collectible too, the advertising matchbook was first used by the Mendelson Opera Company. By 1900, the matchbook was being widely used as a promotional vehicle.

1940s . . . Around as a promotional product since 1908, the woodcased pencil became quite famous during World War II when the Columbia Pencil Company manufactured 2 million pencils to be dropped over occupied territory. These included those dropped over the Philippines bearing that now famous quote of General Douglas McArthur, "I shall return." Still immensely popular, pencils are categorized with all writing instruments, which make up 12.3 percent of the promotional products industry today.

1945 . . . The war's end meant an end to material rationing and a return to more balanced manufacturing, but 1945 also marked a writing revolution of sorts. An estimated 5,000 people gathered in front of Gimbel's in Manhattan to lay out $12.50 for a Reynolds, the first commercially available ballpoint pen in the country. Despite their waxy, slow-drying ink, 10,000 pens were sold in six hours. Within five years, ballpoints became commonplace, shortly eclipsing fountain pens as the preferred writing instrument. A natural for imprinting, they remain one of the largest-selling promotional products.