59 www.printmonthly.co.uk Issue 362 - September | October 2026 CLOSER LOOK | SOCIAL MEDIA BAN AND PRINT age accounts to avoid Ofcom penalties, brands that have quietly built follower counts partly on under-16 users will watch those numbers fall. Industry reaction has also been telling. Voices in fashion retail, a sector that has leaned harder into social-first marketing than almost any other, are already talking about redirecting budgets into broadcast, magazine partnerships, and branded merchandise rather than cutting youth marketing spend altogether. It’s not that budgets are being cut or the money is disappearing, it’s that it has to go somewhere else. That being said, banning an app doesn’t necessarily stop people using it. Australia got here first, banning under-16 social media access in December 2025, and the early data is mixed. On one hand, the eSafety commissioner reported that platforms removed access to 4.7 million under-16 accounts within weeks, and a YouGov survey found three in five Australian adults now believe the ban is working. On the other hand, a peer-reviewed BMJ study found little evidence of any real drop in use. Over 85% of under-16s were still active on major platforms, getting round age checks through borrowed accounts, fake profiles, and private browsers. The ban isn’t removing under-16s from these platforms. It’s just removing them from brands’ view. A Generation Already Drifting Back to the Physical Separately from the legislation, there’s a cultural shift worth keeping an eye on. Gen Z didn’t wait for a ban to start rediscovering physical formats. Vinyl, film cameras, and independent print magazine launches have all been climbing for years, driven by exactly the age group the ban targets. Research from analyst firm Quocirca frames this as less a rejection of digital and more a hunger for something tactile as a counterweight to algorithmic overload, with print increasingly read as a mark of trust and authenticity in a world thick with AI-generated content. That trust point matters more than nostalgia. Consumer research from Attest has tracked rising Gen Z scepticism toward AI-generated content specifically, with human-made, long-form print work benefiting from that scrutiny rather than losing out to it. A generation raised inside a feed engineered to hold their attention has good reason to be curious about something that was never designed to be addictive in the first place. Schools and universities are having a version of this same reckoning, for a different reason. As generative AI tools have become embedded in how students research and write, institutions have struggled to tell AI-assisted work from a student’s own. Ofqual, the UK’s exams regulator, has already flagged the scale of the wider device problem. In the 2025 summer series alone, 2,225 malpractice cases involving mobile phones and smart devices were recorded across GCSE and A-level exams, and the regulator has since warned that AI-enabled smart glasses could pose a similar threat to exam integrity. The response, in the UK and beyond, has increasingly been a return to paper. Universities including Bath and Cardiff are shifting more assessment back to supervised, in-person, handwritten conditions specifically to keep AI out of the room, and exam booklets are having a genuine resurgence in the US for the same reason. If exam boards, schools, and universities are leaning back into printed materials to preserve trust in what a young person actually knows, that’s a parallel, education-sector demand for exactly the kind of tangible, verifiable format the under-16 ban is pushing brands towards for very different reasons. The Numbers That Make the Case to a Finance Director Changes in how a younger demographic is digesting information are something we shouldn’t be ignoring, but they won’t get the budget signed off on their own. The door drop and direct mail data, however, will. JICMAIL’s benchmarks put door drop campaigns at an average return of £2.90 for every £1 spent, with mail overall achieving a 96% household engagement rate. Royal Mail’s Marketreach, with WARC, analysed 218 UK campaigns run between 2016 and 2022 and found that 35% of campaigns using direct mail reported an ROI benefit, against a 23% average across all UK marketing activity. The Gen Z-specific numbers are worth pulling into any pitch to a brand still nervous about print. Censuswide research commissioned by Marketreach, surveying nearly 1,900 Gen Z respondents, found 75% would engage with a discount or voucher sent through unaddressed mail, with a genuinely useful offer, a recognisable brand, or a personal interest cited as the strongest hooks. A third rated handwritten cards and letters as the most personal form of communication, ahead of phone calls. Because far fewer brands currently target this age group by post, the cut-through is disproportionate. Gen Z are 40% more likely than the average UK adult to say mail can change their mind about a brand. Where This Leaves Print and Direct Mail None of this means social media marketing to teenagers quietly disappears. Australia’s experience suggests plenty of under-16s will still find their way onto these platforms regardless of what the law says. But it does mean brands that have run their entire strategy through one channel are about to be forced into a rethink. For printers and direct mail specialists, the opportunity isn’t to pitch physical media as a nostalgia play. It’s to walk into conversations already happening about reallocated budget, with the numbers, and a generation’s lived experience, to back up why a letterbox still beats a feed that was never built with their wellbeing inmind. Arguably, the social media ban for under-16s is going to have an impact. […] But from a marketing perspective, this will definitely change things
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