Most door drop campaigns underperform for one simple reason. Agencies are sending them to places where nobody is talking about the brand. When a household has never heard of you, the mail goes straight in the bin. And when their friends are using a competitor, it suffers the same fate.

This session gives agencies a smarter way to plan door drops for 2026. Using behavioural science and network modelling, we’ll show how to detect the neighbourhoods where a brand is already spreading through real world word of mouth. These advocacy hotspots behave very differently to cold postcodes, and targeting them can lift response rates while cutting wasted spend.

You’ll learn how Herdify maps existing customers, identifies spreading behaviour, and produces a simple shortlist of the most responsive areas for acquisition campaigns, with insights that improve automatically after each campaign you run.

Agencies will leave with a practical framework for using real world influence to improve door drop performance. Less waste. Better targeting. And campaigns that finally land where people are ready to listen.

Tom Ridges is the founder and CEO of Herdify, the behavioural science company helping brands target their door drop and direct mail campaigns to the places where people are already talking about them. His work focuses on a problem most agencies know too well: campaigns miss their targets because they’re sent to areas where nobody has heard of the brand.

Tom has spent years exploring how influence travels through real communities. That curiosity led his team to build a model grounded in behavioural science and network effects, capable of detecting where a brand is genuinely spreading through in-person conversations. By analysing customer purchase timing and location, Herdify highlights the neighbourhoods where word of mouth is strongest and the areas most likely to convert in acquisition campaigns.

Outside the data, Tom is driven by a simple idea: marketing works best when you understand how people influence each other in the real world. His work brings that to the surface for agencies who want smarter, more reliable door drop performance.