The conference, titled ‘The Rise of the Super Touchpoint’, was held at the London Embankment office of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

It attracted mailing houses, advertisers, and agencies, and hosted industry speakers offering updates on subjects including modern brand building, and the shifting shape of direct mail in 2025, as well as a JICMail best practice showcase.

Opening the event, JICMail engagement director Mark Cross gave a roundup of JICMail’s activities and highlights over the last year, including expanding its Gold dataset into different sources and tools, the scaling up of its Response Rate Tracker, and the release of rebooted mail circulation data alongside Nielsen.

Cross also considered how factors including the return of President Trump in the US and the “AI era of transformation” could impact the marketing landscape.

In the second session, Ian Gibbs, director of data leadership and learning at JICMail, introduced the company’s latest report, ‘Mail: The Super Touchpoint’.

Gibbs said the report looks at what makes a super touchpoint and he reviewed how mail cuts through the noise in times of uncertainty – making the case for the medium as a super touchpoint.

“If you look at the DMA’s Effectiveness Databank, it tells us that performance marketing is struggling. It’s been on the decline in terms of effectiveness over the last few years; there are numerous reasons but cost per acquisitions are going up."

He said reasons included Google changing its plans on third-party cookies, and the cost-of-living crisis that has seen consumers get more price sensitive, which “has a downward pressure on loyalty”.

“There’s also total ad saturation out there, declining creativity, increased competition for consumer attention – all these factors place a downward pressure on effectiveness throughout the customer journey.

“That's why we believe that more than ever before, marketers should be investing in super touchpoints channels which either explicitly meet these challenges head on, or at least implicitly deal with these challenges through the way in which they connect with consumers.”

To define what a super touchpoint is, JICMail conducted a roundtable with the DMA, where it spoke to a cross section of the industry, including advertisers, media agencies, the IPA, and Marketreach.

“We road tested this language around super touchpoints to see if people really identified with us, and identified with the challenges that we've outlined, to see if they like the language, and to throw back challenges at us as well in terms of how we define it. But most importantly, we got those guys to define it for us.”

The panel concluded that a super touchpoint enables marketers to merge audience-first planning with a cut-through behavioural or creative insight, to deliver disproportionately effective outcomes for consumers and brands alike.

It creates deeper emotional connections with consumers, delivers a stimulating sensory experience that attracts attention, provides advertisers with a platform for brand storytelling and/or inspires consumers to start a conversation.

They also said any channel can be a super touchpoint. If it conforms to best practice measurement, has the tools available to create a genuine and surprising customer insight, and has the potential to drive impact at all stages of the purchase cycle “then it should encourage marketers to think about a disproportionately large investment to drive disproportionately effective outcomes”.

After explaining the various reasons why mail can be considered a super touchpoint, including its creative power and ability to create emotional connections and leverage trust, Gibbs recommended that brands and marketers should put all of their super touchpoints in a rank order and decide how to act accordingly.

“So with your top 25% of touchpoints you might say ‘we’re going to put disproportionate investment in these touchpoints because we reckon we're going to get disproportionately effective outcomes. Perhaps your bottom 25% you might make the bold choice to divest from the usage of these channels.

“With the middle 50%, perhaps you put them in some sort of performance review where you get more involved in test and learn to try and optimise their performance.”

He added: “We think mail is a super touchpoint channel, because it has impact throughout the customer journey. It attracts consumer attention, it deepens customer relationships, and it ignites household conversations.

“So whether you want to talk to consumers, customers or households, mail can do that. I guess the point with the mail channel is that it is highly trusted, it's tactile. We know through JICMail that it is interacted with frequently throughout the course of the month. Each of those physical interactions is a moment of positive friction, and that friction generates attention.

“And we don't just talk about attention and lifespan in the mail world in terms of milliseconds or seconds. We talk about it in terms of minutes and days and weeks, it's a completely different ballpark to other media channels.”

Gibbs’ presentation was followed by a keynote from Grace Kite, CEO of Magic Numbers, on the state of marketing effectiveness, and then a panel session which included expert practitioners from Tesco Media, MediaSense, and ISBA looking at retail media trends and the role of mail.

Experts from Herdify, Paperplanes, and Your Golf Travel also delivered presentations on the effectiveness of mail, while Whistl and Precision Marketing Group explained how they use JICMail’s tools in their own businesses, before a final panel session including some of the day’s earlier speakers plus the DMA brought the conference to a close.