MarTech: 3 direct mail lessons for evaluating agentic commerce

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the full article here.

Walk into any CMO’s office this quarter, and you’ll find a stack of vendor proposals built on 12-month payback periods, with vendors quite confident about year one and a little less sure about year three. This is where a successful pilot turns into technical and operational debt.

The agentic commerce pitches start to blur together. One rewrites the funnel, another consolidates the stack, and a third replaces tools the CMO bought 12 months ago. The acronyms are in place (UCP, MCP, A2A, etc.), and the demos are impressive. But like any emerging category, there are big unknowns: acquisitions, evolving protocols, and pricing changes that can upend a three-year roadmap.

To evaluate these investments, it helps to look at a channel that has already survived decades of technological disruption: direct mail.

Unfashionable as it may be to say, direct mail will outlast most of the agentic commerce startups pitching you today. That’s a strange thing to say in a year when AI agents influenced 20% of all Cyber Week orders in 2025 and drove an estimated $67 billion in global sales, according to Salesforce. The capability is real, and so is the money behind it. 

Direct mail, meanwhile, was supposed to die when email arrived, then again for banner ads, programmatic, social, and retail media. It’s still in the budget, having survived four rebuilds of everything around it.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the full article here.