We might be in the thick of what could be termed “silly season”. Client contacts have disappeared on holiday, inboxes are filling with out-of-office replies and the frenetic pace of agency life might just have slowed down a tad after months of deadlines.
For many, it’s a chance to catch their breath. But for Cadie Lewis-Mayor, Co-Creation and Marketing at Print.com, that slower pace presents one of the biggest commercial opportunities of the year.
While much of the industry press pause, she believes the brands and agencies that perform best in the final quarter are often the ones using summer to think differently.
“We all really underestimate this time of year,” she says. “We thrive off busyness and reactivity, so summer feels like a natural pause. But if everyone’s pausing, isn’t that exactly the moment to grab their attention?”
Rather than viewing quieter weeks as lost time, Cadie says Print.com has treated it as valuable creative space to step back from day-to-day delivery and think about what comes next.
That matters because, before long, attention will shift to one of the busiest periods of the year.
Winning Q4 starts long before September
For many agencies, September marks the return to full speed. Clients are back at their desks, campaigns ramp up and attention quickly turns towards the final quarter.
The temptation is to wait until then before restarting business development.
But Cadie argues that’s already too late. “My inbox is still full of cold emails right now,” she says. “That hasn’t stopped at all, but the opportunity is sitting right in front of us.
“You could use this time to plan your September outreach, or go a step further and think about a more creative route, even if it takes a bit more time to put together. There’s no better time really.
“Because if you think about it, people come back to their desks, open up their laptop, and what are the chances your email stands out among everything else that’s piled up? But a well thought out mailing waiting for them? It’s really hard to ignore.”
It’s a simple idea. While everyone else is preparing to compete for attention in overcrowded inboxes, why not arrive somewhere different altogether?
Zig while everyone else zags
Cadie describes it as “zigging while everyone else zags.”
For her, it’s less about spending more money on marketing and more about challenging assumptions about timing.
“It means using the quiet of summer to do something different while everyone else pauses,” she explains. “It’s holiday season, people are away from their desks, and when they get back, they’re wading through an inbox full of emails they’ve missed. If you’ve sent something digital, there’s a good chance it’s already been lost in that pile before it’s even been opened.
“It doesn’t get buried under a hundred unread emails, land in the junk folder or get scrolled past.
“So while everyone else is zagging – going quiet over summer and piling into inboxes in September – print lets you zig. It shows up when there’s less noise, and it stays around through the returning noise too.”
The principle extends beyond print itself.
When the industry slows down, there is often more room to experiment, think creatively and develop ideas that rarely make it onto the to-do list during busier periods.
“There’s less pressure all around,” she says. “When things are quieter, you’re not just reacting to whatever’s urgent that day – you’ve actually got room to think and be creative. And that headspace is what makes it easier to try something different because you’re not rushing to get something out the door just to keep pace with everyone else.”
Creativity beyond the inbox
That thinking has even shaped Print.com’s own summer outreach campaign, which swapped another sales email for a travel-themed creative pack designed to arrive while agency teams were preparing for their holidays. It comes with its own notepad to jot down those ideas that might just come to you while you’re sipping a pina colada around the hotel pool.
Rather than sending branded merchandise for its own sake, the aim was to give recipients something genuinely useful while encouraging them to think differently about the months ahead.
“The thinking is usually the same for us,” says Cadie. “Give people something useful, not just branded stationery for the sake of it.
“If it adds real value while someone’s away from their desk, it earns a different kind of attention than a typical piece of outreach ever could.
“The timing matters too. Away from the usual routines and deadlines, people tend to be more open to fresh ideas than they are mid-week, mid-deadline, buried in the usual noise. If you can reach someone in that headspace, even briefly, you’re not competing with everything else landing in their inbox that day.”
Standing out in an AI world
The argument feels particularly relevant as AI-generated marketing content becomes increasingly commonplace.
Cadie believes many inboxes are beginning to suffer from a sameness that makes genuinely creative work even more valuable.
“Everyone’s inbox is full of the same stuff at the moment,” she says. “Loads of it is very clearly AI-generated, loads of it is just templated outreach that all blurs into one.
“You can tell within about two seconds, and you just scroll past it or delete it. Print doesn’t have that problem because it’s not even in that space to begin with.”
For agencies, she sees an opportunity to demonstrate creative work through their own marketing.
“Rather than just telling a potential client, ‘We do creative work,’ why not show them through your own outreach?,” she says. “Send something that’s actually been thought about and that lands so differently to another email getting lost in someone’s inbox. It says something about how you work before you’ve even had a conversation with them.”
She also believes the physical nature of print gives it advantages that digital channels simply cannot replicate.
“Holding something physical activates more of the senses than digital alone – feel, smell and sound – which scientifically gives you a deeper connection to the information you’re taking in.
“It is just more human.”
A different way to think about summer
The lesson, for Cadie, isn’t that agencies should abandon digital marketing or replace email with direct mail.
It’s that quieter periods create opportunities to rethink familiar approaches.
Instead of seeing summer as a gap between campaigns, perhaps it should be viewed as the moment to develop the ideas that will define the months ahead.
As Cadie puts it: “Standing out right now isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing something different.
“Print is the perfect example of that. It doesn’t have to be louder, just well timed, and it will be harder to ignore.”
