Recent weeks have been rough on the direct mail sector, which has been battered by bad news. I was particularly sad to see Colin Clapp, a family-owned business of fifty years standing and excellent reputation, hit the buffers. It seems that those who predicted another tough year ahead for the sector were correct, and the July-August period has put its usual squeeze on cashflow.

The latest Direct Marketing Association (DMA) figures on inserts show the huge decline in this type of communication in the mass market media, with newspaper and magazine insert volumes both falling by more than 30%. No doubt the credit crunch will have affected spend, as will the ongoing moves to more targeted mailings and a shift in marketing spend to digital channels - as evidenced by news that WH Smith is to switch its Clubcard loyalty programme to an email scheme instead. Okay, inserts aren't the sort of sophisticated DM pieces that pick up awards for inventiveness and effectiveness, but whichever way you cut it a 30%-plus fall is A LOT. I was also interested to see that in a recent Marketing Direct report on the biggest users of direct mail, the top five brands all registered double-digit decreases in their spend.

So what's next for a sector that's grown used to growth? Aside from ever-more targeted mailings and multi-channel campaigns, transpromo has been a buzzword for the past year or so, often cited as the potential boom area for print-based direct communications. This fusing of transactional mailings with targeted marketing messages appears to make sense, but I'm seeing little evidence of its impact yet. It's also somewhat at odds with concerted campaigns by major billers such as utilities and the financial services sector to cut costs and reduce the amount of paperwork they generate by incentivising customers to switch to online billing.

Meanwhile, will the contentious PAS 2020 environmental standard proposals result in the sector ditching its "junk mail" image? Somehow I doubt it. Rather, it will result in yet more costs being absorbed by printers at the expense of margin.

There are challenging times ahead for those at the helm of print's DM specialists. The tectonic plates are shifting in DM, and the resulting shake-out is likely to result in further casualties.