Major new mail attention study: The Time We Spend With Mail

JICMAIL’s major new attention study, 'The Time We Spend With Mail,’ quantifies the amount of time consumers spend with their mail. The average piece of Direct Mail is looked at for 108 seconds across the course of a month, while the average Door Drop is viewed for 46 seconds.

The mail channel is more attention efficient than a host of other media platforms, resulting in the recommendation that it is a “must-have” channel on attention-based media plans.

The year-long measurement programme has seen JICMAIL role out full attention measurement across its entire panel of 1,000 households per month (capturing time-spent metrics for Business Mail, Direct Mail, Door Drops and Partially Addressed Mail). At the same time, the AI driven video analytics company Lifestream has provided directly observed mail attention data with which to validate the panel findings, while PwC have scrutinised the mail efficiency calculations that JICMAIL has generated to compare delivery of time spent to other media channels.

Ian Gibbs, JICMAIL’s Director of Data Leadership and Learning says of the research, “We’re delighted that JICMAIL has managed to provide a definitive view on the time spent with mail, plus a whole host of additional insights into the planning factors most strongly linked to high mail attention. Triangulating in on the truth using multiple data sources is an important step in contemporary media research, and it’s been a great validator of the core JICMAIL panel methodology to see how closely aligned it is with observed video-analytics data."

Mark Cross, JICMAIL’s Engagement Director says, “Appreciating that attention is a ‘hot topic’ for all planners, we were determined with this work for Mail to find its rightful place in these considerations. The results in this report are nothing sort of stunning, deserving high attention from planners across the disciplines. The journey of mail around the home accumulates un-paralleled levels of largely solus time spent with mail, triggering multiple minutes across the marketing funnel and offers the prospect of a high attention effectiveness multiplier. Rewarding the time spent with mail is now a key planning metric!”

Following the release of The Time We Spend With Mail, a roundtable of industry experts was convened in Autumn 2023 to discuss the implications of the report. The discussion focused on the impact of attention based planning not only on the mail channel specifically, but also on the increasingly multi-disciplinary tasks of media planning and measurement more broadly.

The roundtable featured attendees from Boots, Virgin Media O2, Havas, Join The Dots, MBAStack, Marketreach, Oliver, PHD Media, VCCP, VMLY&R and  BJ&A. The resulting conversation revealed a handful of vital considerations for attention based planning that have been published in JICMAIL’s Attention Manifesto, available for download below.