Marketing manager and freelance marketing consultant, Rachael Hunt, talks about the impact a social media ban could have on print and the wider trend of disconnecting from digital technology to interact with tactile experiences for both practical and marketing purposes
On 15th June 2026, then prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, announced a social media ban for under-16s in the UK, covering Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. It follows the same model as Australia, which implemented something similar last year. Enforcement will fall on platforms, not families, with implementation expected as soon as Spring 2027.
After a long day at secondary school back in the mid-2000s, I would often find myself on the family computer, MSN loaded along with MySpace and, later, Tumblr. I was probably among the first generations exposed to social media at a young age, and arguably the first to be exposed to a particular kind of toxicity that comes from people hiding behind a keyboard with no thought for the consequences. As someone who was on the receiving end many times, when I heard the government’s plans for a social media ban on under-16s, I wasn’t surprised. If anything, I understood exactly why it had come to this.
Government polling by YouGov ahead of the announcement found the ban was backed by 90% of parents, while a separate survey put support at 75%, with parents citing concerns over their children’s wellbeing. This generation of parents are now watching their kids grow up online as they did, and seeing the same, if not increasing, impact it is having on their mental health.
What I didn’t have back then, as a teenager on MySpace and Tumblr, was an algorithm working out how to keep me there. Designer Aza Raskin, who has been widely credited with inventing the infinite scroll, has since described it as something close to a compulsion built by design. There was no natural stopping point, no moment to decide you’re done. You were being shown another post loading before you’d even finished processing the last one. Researchers studying the mechanism compare it to a slot machine. With every scroll, you get a small, uncertain reward, and that uncertainty is precisely what keeps a brain, especially a developing one, coming back.
Research shows that Meta knows this is happening. Court filings and whistleblower testimony, including from Frances Haugen in 2021, allege the company’s own researchers documented Instagram and Facebook’s harm to teenage mental health for years, while executives repeatedly shelved fixes that would have limited engagement. Meta disputes how that evidence has been characterised. But the pattern is hard to ignore. My generation grew up exposed to the harm social media could do. This generation has grown up inside platforms engineered, deliberately, to be difficult to put down.
Arguably, the social media ban for under-16s is going to have an impact. […] But from a marketing perspective, this will definitely change things
Arguably, the social media ban for under-16s is going to have an impact. Whether that is going to be positive or negative in the long term is up for debate. But from a marketing perspective, this will definitely change things. Especially for companies whose marketing strategy involves targeting, even if not directly, those aged under 16.
Analysts at eMarketer have revised UK digital ad spend forecasts for 2027 down by roughly £1.3bn, from £18.3bn to around £17bn. This is on the assumption that a huge, highly engaged under-16 segment simply stops being reachable through social media. Fewer eligible users means the same pool of advertisers competing for fewer impressions. For those in digital marketing, this could mean higher costs for everyone still bidding.
There’s a reputational hit coming too. As platforms purge unverified and underage 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.
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.
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.
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 in mind.
