As digital attention collapses and optimization culture reaches breaking point, marketers are rediscovering an old truth: what people remember isn’t what they see, but what they feel. The next era of effectiveness will be sensory, physical and built to perform.
Industry leaders from Ipsos, Advertising Association and Leap | The Drum Predictions 2026
There’s a quiet paradox sitting at the heart of modern marketing. We’ve never had more data, more channels or more tools to optimize performance – and yet impact has never felt so fragile.
At The Drum Predictions 2026, one idea cut through with surprising clarity: the brands that win next are the ones audiences can feel.
This ‘sensory shift’ – a return to touch, physicality and emotional connection – was the focus of a Canon-backed panel featuring Colin Strong, head of behavioral science at Ipsos; Stephen Woodford, CEO of the Advertising Association; and MJ Evely, client director at LEAP. Together, they unpacked why “sense making”, craft and physical experience are reasserting themselves as drivers of both brand and performance.
For Strong, the shift is rooted in how humans actually change behavior and where digital-first thinking has fallen short.
“We’ve been in an environment where the mantra has been ‘make it easy, make it frictionless’,” he explained. “That works if you’re the market leader. But if you’re trying to change behavior, or do something challenging, people just dismiss information and don’t really engage.”
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Instead, Strong argued, brands need to disrupt habitual thinking – and that’s where physical experiences play a critical role. “We have to disrupt those mental processes. We need to surprise people, provoke them, engage them. And that’s where physical really matters,” he said. “Physical things make us stop, slow down and rethink.”
The idea that physical communication creates mental ‘grip’ resonated throughout the discussion. But the panel was clear this isn’t nostalgia for legacy channels. It’s a response to an industry that has over-rotated towards optimization at the expense of meaning.
Woodford described this imbalance as an “efficiency death spiral”, referencing analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank. “There’s been an obsession with optimization and efficiency,” he said. “But over time, that delivers less and less, because you’re not growing the market or widening reach.”
The antidote, he argued, is expanding, not shrinking, the media palette. “The average case in the IPA Databank uses nine channels,” Woodford noted. “If brands are only using two or three, there’s a danger they’re stuck in that efficiency death spiral.”
Crucially, this isn’t a brand-versus-performance debate. “The way to drive really great performance is to have a really great brand,” Woodford said. “And the way to get the best value out of brand investment is fantastic performance media. They work together.”
That interplay came to life when the conversation turned to print and physical formats – not as a single channel, but as a system of different roles and functions.
Evely was keen to challenge lingering biases. “Print has grown this unfair perception of being untrackable or legacy,” she said. “That’s just not true anymore.”
More importantly, she argued, physical formats operate in a fundamentally different psychological space. “Print and physical aren’t interrupting you while you’re trying to do something else,” she said. “You’re met in a more open moment. People are less defensive, less resistant.”
That openness makes physical formats powerful for trust, consideration and brand building – especially when integrated with digital. Evely pointed to a campaign that combined highly crafted direct mail with digital reinforcement. “I saw it physically first, reacted to it as a person, and then when I saw it reinforced digitally, I recalled that feeling,” she said. “That’s a huge opportunity brands aren’t using enough.”
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Strong reinforced the point, highlighting the “quality signals” embedded in physical craft. “When you touch something, you immediately understand the care and investment behind it,” he said. “That builds trust and integrity. It’s very public – you’re putting your brand out into the world.”
As AI accelerates content creation and sameness, those signals matter more than ever. “Craft sends subconscious messages,” Woodford added. “If there’s effort and care, people feel it. And that affects how they value the brand.”
The panel closed with a tactile moment: the audience was handed a printed piece and invited to hold it – a deliberate pause that embodied the session’s core argument.
Asked what brands should remember heading into 2026, the answers converged.
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Evely urged marketers to stop thinking in silos: “Recognize the strengths of different formats and approach them as a system that works together.”
Woodford encouraged experimentation: “If you’re using five channels, try a couple more. Expand the media palette.”
And Strong brought it back to fundamentals: “An emotional, visceral response is possible – and if you want attention and memory, that’s incredibly powerful.”
In a world obsessed with speed and scale, the most radical prediction of all may be this: effectiveness feels different. And the brands that remember how to make people feel will be the ones that truly perform.
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