The conference, titled ‘Measurement and Attention – why it matters for mail’, was held at the More London office of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). It attracted mailing houses, advertisers, and agencies, and hosted industry speakers offering updates on subjects including measurement, data protection, and effective planning, as well as a JICMail best practice showcase.

Opening the event, JICMail engagement director Mark Cross addressed one of the dominant industry – and global – trends of the last year; the rise of AI.

He also announced Whistl, Bountiful Cow, Paragon, Phase Marketing Design & Print, and The Specialist Works as this year’s JICMail Platinum Awards winners – the subscribers that he said “demonstrate exceptional best practice with our data, embedding it into their businesses, their selling and planning processes […] and they really do have a body of work that demonstrates the value of JICMail to them and their clients”.

After talks from speakers from the7stars, Virgin Media O2, PwC, and the DMA, Ian Gibbs, director of data leadership and learning at JICMail, introduced the company’s updated tool, Discovery 3.0, which is being launched on Monday (6 November).

“For those of you who are hardcore JICMail users, particularly Platinum subscribers, you will be very familiar with JICMail Discovery – it is the primary data portal by which the vast majority of our users access our data.

“We’ve had a lot of success with it over the last half decade, it’s really how we transform JICMail data into very meaningful insight in terms of how you plan and measure campaigns and look at what your competitors are doing.

“Discovery 3.0 is a much faster, more flexible, and more dynamic system. It looks deliberately similar to the old version but there are some fundamental differences.”

Updates include more room for users to create customised target audiences to drill further down into trends for different audiences; tools to help users build a case for mail; and tools that help planning and performance, among several other new additions.

Speakers from Marketreach, BJ&A, VCCP, and Havas Media joined a later panel on attention and effective planning, before JICMail users from Paragon, The Letterbox Consultancy, Starcount and Bountiful Cow outlined the ways in which they have used JICMail data to support or strengthen customer campaigns.

Gemma Mitchell, managing director at Paragon Customer Communications, said: “JICMail is the cornerstone to our client conversations, and I don’t say that lightly or flippantly.

"Ultimately JICMail makes our job easier – we’ve heard a lot today about how difficult it is to have budget conversations, and how finding our place in marketing strategies and being the channel choice is super difficult.

“So we use JICMail in a number of ways; we talk about strategy – we are coming from a digital-first platform over the years so it’s how we provide that irrefutable argument for mail’s place. When we talk about planning, it’s again providing that empirical evidence.

“People is a really interesting point as well – for me it’s about how we re-energise and reinvigorate what has been perceived as a bit of a dying channel; I’ve heard quite a lot over the years that print is dead – it is definitely not.

“And then it’s about the outcomes – it generates energy, customer outcomes, and intelligence.”

She added: “I think JICMail enables us to attract youth and diversity into our channel, it makes mail sexy again, it makes it a bit more accessible and it gives people tools and the touchpoint at our fingertips to enable us to have a bit more confidence.”

The day was rounded off with a closing panel, where speakers from the7stars, Virgin Media O2, Starcount and Nutshell Creative reflected on their key conference takeaways.