中文Every few years someone declares direct mail dead, and every few years the data politely declines to cooperate. The latest Advertising Expenditure Report from the Advertising Association and WARC is the most recent example: UK advertising investment climbed 9.3% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 to reach £11.7 billion, and within that total, direct mail grew 7.9%, outpacing total television, radio, and most published media categories.
That is not a rounding error. That is a mature channel, one repeatedly written off as a legacy format, growing faster than the media that were supposed to have replaced it.
The shape of the quarter
Search remained the single largest advertising category at £4.6 billion, which surprises nobody. Retail media, social media, digital out-of-home and addressable television all posted double-digit growth, reflecting how much money is now chasing audiences that can be identified, targeted and measured. Magazine and newspaper advertising continued their long decline overall, although digital magazine brands eked out modest growth of 2.9%.
Set against that backdrop, direct mail’s 7.9% increase is worth pausing on. It sits in the same report as categories with far more fashionable narratives, and it beat most of them. Looking forward, the report forecasts direct mail spending will hold stable through 2026, while total UK advertising investment is expected to grow 8.2% to £50.5 billion before climbing to £53.5 billion in 2027.
Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive of the Advertising Association, described the quarter as evidence of “the continuing resilience and rapid evolution of the UK advertising industry.” His reading is that advertisers large and small “are finding value across our entire advertising ecosystem” rather than concentrating spend in a narrow set of channels. WARC’s Suzy Young added that the updated expenditure report gives greater transparency into shifting media investment patterns as advertisers diversify across established and emerging channels.
Why the channel keeps refusing to die
The instinct is to explain direct mail’s persistence as nostalgia or inertia. Neither holds up. The more honest explanation is that the conditions which were supposed to kill direct mail have instead made it more valuable.
Digital advertising has become extraordinarily crowded. Inbox saturation, ad blockers, banner blindness and the slow erosion of third-party cookies have all raised the cost of reaching a real human being with a message they actually notice. A physical mailpiece, arriving in a household that receives perhaps a handful of them a week rather than a few hundred emails a day, has a scarcity advantage it did not have twenty years ago. Attention has become the constrained resource, and print buys attention efficiently.
The second factor is measurement. Direct mail used to be a channel you ran on faith. Now it is routinely deployed with unique URLs, QR codes, matched-back purchase data and control-group testing that produce attribution as rigorous as anything in digital. Once a channel can prove return on investment to a CFO, it stops being a line item that gets cut first.
Integration, not competition
The most consequential shift in the data is not that direct mail is growing but how it is growing. The report reinforces a pattern that has been building for several years: direct mail is increasingly deployed as one component of integrated omnichannel campaigns rather than as a standalone tactic competing against digital media.
In practice this means personalized print landing in the same week as a retargeting sequence, a mailpiece triggered by an abandoned online basket, or a physical catalogue timed to reinforce a retail media placement. The channels are not fighting each other for budget; they are being orchestrated from the same customer data platform toward the same conversion goal. The modest 2.9% growth in digital magazine brands points in the same direction, evidence of continued migration toward blended print and digital marketing strategies.
The commercial opportunity for printers
This is where the report stops being industry trivia and becomes a business case. If direct mail is now bought as part of an integrated, data-driven campaign, then the supplier best positioned to win the work is not necessarily the one with the cheapest cost per thousand. It is the one that can handle data hygiene, segmentation, variable-data composition, campaign timing, response tracking and post-campaign analysis.
That is a materially different service proposition from putting ink on paper, and it commands materially different margins. Printers who have invested in data capability, workflow automation and marketing services find themselves selling into a growing budget line. Printers who have not are competing for the shrinking commodity portion of that same budget, against everyone else who also has a press.
The uncomfortable corollary is that the growth documented in this report will not be distributed evenly. A channel growing 7.9% overall can still contain suppliers losing volume, if the growth is concentrated in the sophisticated, data-led end of the market and the supplier in question is not operating there.
What to take from it
The headline number, £11.7 billion and 9.3% growth, tells you the UK advertising market is healthy and confident. The direct mail number tells you something more specific and more actionable: that high-quality, personalized, measurable print remains one of the strongest-performing print applications available, and that the demand is being driven by marketers prioritizing measurable ROI and customer personalization rather than by sentiment.
For commercial printers, that is a clearer growth signal than most sectors of the industry will see this year. The question is not whether the demand exists. It is whether the capability to serve it does.
Source: INKISH.NEWS, reporting on the Advertising Association / WARC Advertising Expenditure Report, August 2026.
