中文There is something quietly powerful about a room full of printers and mailers finally letting their hair down. Last night in London, nearly 300 of them did exactly that — and the takeaway was far bigger than any trophy on the table.
The Strategic Mailing Partnership (SMP) staged its annual Networking and Awards Evening at the Steel Yard venue on 15 October, and by every account it was one of the liveliest nights on the industry calendar. Confetti rained down as winners from four categories celebrated on stage. But behind the glitz, this event was really a love letter to a trade that keeps finding ways to reinvent itself.
If you don’t know the SMP, here’s the quick version: it’s a professional body sponsored and backed by Royal Mail, and its whole job is to represent and protect the interests of printers and mailing houses across the UK. In a year when everyone is feeling the squeeze, that kind of advocacy matters more than ever.
This year’s awards ran across four categories: 2026 Mail Performance, Sustainable Campaign, Bright Futures, and — newly minted — a Lifetime Achievement award. Each one tells you something about where print and mail are actually heading.
Take Mail Performance first. The SMP said this year’s entries proved what happens when you get smarter about targeting, when pack design genuinely means something, and when mail gets woven into the customer journey at exactly the right moment. Bronze went to Webmart, silver to PDV and Marketreach, gold to Precision Proco and PDV, and the platinum gong went to Whistl Doordrop Media and Paragon. If you’re a brand still sleeping on direct mail, that shortlist alone should shake you awake.
Then there’s the Sustainable Campaign category, and this is where the real soul of the night lived. The winners here weren’t ticking boxes — they were rethinking waste, emissions and the entire supply chain. APS Group picked up a highly commended nod, and Webmart took gold. The throughline was clear: make carbon impact measurable instead of mystical, and bake sustainability into strategy rather than bolting it on at the end.
The Bright Futures Award is the one that genuinely brought a lump to the throat. It spotlights young people aged 18 to 35 who are already shaping the industry’s future — folks working in HR, project management, planning, business development and marketing. Samuel Malanda from Paragon was highly commended, Callan Danvers from Paragon took bronze, Isobel Arnold from Paragon silver, and Francesca Baker from MPS Marketing Services walked away with gold. Watching a room of hardened industry veterans whoop for twenty-somethings is a reminder that this trade still knows how to nurture its own.
And the Lifetime Achievement award — the one everyone was curious about — went to Bob Carter, co-founder of BBS, who has spent 50 years in the sector and pioneered the postcode lookup technology most of us now take for granted every time we type a postcode at an online checkout. Fifty years. Let that sink in for a second.
Host Mark Stephenson from The Spark Organisation summed up the mood perfectly: the Bright Futures winners were “so excited to win something, and they really celebrated as well!” SMP chair Lucy Swanston struck a more reflective note, pointing out that in the current climate the standard of entries was outstanding — and that the real work starts now, taking all this brilliant case-study material and broadcasting it to brands and marketers who haven’t yet discovered what mail can do.
That last point is the one I’d underline in bold. Swanston talked about the collaboration she sees in the room — printers, agencies, postage specialists and paper merchants all coming together to make one piece of work shine. “That’s what’s great about our industry,” she said. “There’s a real sense of people working on campaigns in collaboration.” She also flagged something refreshing: look around the room now and you see more women and more young people than ever before. That shift has been a long time coming.
So here’s the practical takeaway. The industry is brilliant at talking to itself, and last night was a glorious example of that. But the opportunity — the actual growth lever — is to take these wins and wave them in front of the wider marketing world. Because if there’s one thing the SMP Awards proved, it’s that print and mail are not fading into the background. They’re getting smarter, greener, and a whole lot more human.
Source: Printweek
