A new WFA report says strategic thinking is advertising’s biggest talent gap. That’s always been true, but now AI is making it more expensive to ignore.
Avoiding hard work, it turns out, isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy.
It’s because our brains have evolved over millions of years to conserve energy, which helps keep us alive. Daniel Kahneman called it the “law of least effort”: given two routes to the same goal, we drift towards the one that demands the least mental work – fast, automatic thinking over the slow, deliberate kind.
Researchers have since measured this directly, establishing
how much money people were willing to give up to avoid a more mentally demanding version of a task.
Business leaders do the same thing when it comes to the hard work of strategy. Strategy professor Richard Rumelt, author of
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, writes:
“Bad strategy flourishes because it floats above analysis, logic, and choice, held aloft by the hot hope that one can avoid dealing with these tricky fundamentals and the difficulties of mastering them. Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.”
Rumelt gives three reasons bad strategy persists:
- The pain of choosing. Real choices create losers, and leaders would rather not disappoint anyone.
- Template strategy. Fill in the blanks – vision, mission, values – and you get something that looks like strategy without any of the analysis.
- Positive thinking. Believing that the right attitude is enough, when proper analysis means imagining everything that could go wrong.
Put simply: strategy is difficult, it requires courage, and it carries risk.
Which is why I was intrigued by a new report out today from the World Federation of Advertisers and consultancy Mediasense,
Humans, Marketing and Machines.
Its headline finding:
strategic thinking is the advertising industry’s number-one talent shortage, or so say 72% of the survey’s respondents.
The explanation?
The pace of change is outstripping the industry’s ability to develop talent.
The answer? Upskilling, capability-building and redesigning incentives.
It’s worth remembering this is a snapshot of what 166 people thought in the second quarter of 2026, not a historical analysis. But it chimes with what I hear from the buy-side these days, particularly in the context of the relentless
AI is changing everythingnarrative: as machines get better at delivering information, humans will need to supply the strategic thinking.
And yet Rumelt’s warning lands with even greater force, once we start imagining a future of eggheads armed with AI agents producing genius brand strategy and media plans. Because strategy is still difficult. It still means specialising, putting more resource into this and less into that, and making hard choices that carry risk.
Not unlike the 16-year-old turning to Minecraft instead of revising for their GCSEs, the typical agency leader avoids difficult strategic decisions because a mistake feels more dangerous than ‘business as usual’.
I’ve watched this for more than a decade covering advertising and media. I feel this tension myself now I have to sell services as a consultant and writer.
A lack of strategy is the root cause of behaviour that will feel familiar to anyone in agencyland. Familiar symptoms include:
- generic positioning (”we do everything for everyone!”)
- giving ideas away for free in pitches (”and if you don’t like those ideas, we’ve got plenty more in the back!”)
- overdelivering on accounts (great customer service papering over strategic cracks)
- accepting poor payment terms (”well I suppose 90 days is doable…”)
The result is a concierge model: here’s the menu, pick what you like and – tragically – pay what you like.
This creates the feeling that the sector is oversupplied. I say
feeling because I’m not convinced there are too many agencies. There may just be too many generic agencies, too broad in what they offer and who they offer it to.
Brand-side marketers report the same shortage, but I think for a different reason. Too often, marketing doesn’t have the ear of the CEO or CFO. When your function lacks influence, strategic risk-taking gets you nothing and “don’t rock the boat” keeps you safe. So business as usual wins again.
That weakness then feeds the agency problem. Advertisers either don’t see agencies as strategic businesses (”they make ads and buy media”) or aren’t convinced strategy is worth paying for – which reinforces the agency habit of not offering it.
So I’m sceptical that AI is why advertisers and agencies now name strategic thinking as their biggest gap. I’d argue the gap has always been there.
But AI will make it far more urgent. AI gives everyone fast, cheap access to the average. A competent media plan, or a monster targeting spreadsheet, is now a compute cost, not a differentiator. That kills the economic case for the safe, generalist agency.
It also poses the brand question: if anyone can get off-the-shelf strategy from Claude or ChatGPT, how does anyone stand out?
The report itself points in this direction. It lists four ways the industry says one thing and rewards another:
- We say we value strategic thinking, then reward execution against plan.
- We prioritise data-driven marketing, then reward activity rather than decisions.
- We invest in AI, then reward efficiency rather than impact.
- We talk about integration, then evaluate people in silos.
That’s Rumelt’s avoidance, written into performance reviews.
There’s another telling detail: agencies are slightly more optimistic than advertisers that their talent models are fit for an AI-enabled future. The report puts this down to agencies experimenting more with AI tools. That may be true.
But I can’t help thinking this optimism comes down to something worse: this is still a sector selling generalist execution that hasn’t yet priced in what happens when execution gets cheap.
It’s easy for me to opine on this as a highly specialised one-person business with no duty of care to hundreds of employees.
And I’ll be the first to admit this stuff is hard. I’ve not got my own positioning, or my own ability to make hard choices, entirely worked out.
But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
And, if strategic thinking is our industry’s biggest talent gap, we should be clear about what strategy is for. The answer is surely not to send agency staff on AI training courses so they get better at prompting Claude and ChatGPT into producing yet more mediocre insights.
Better strategy, at every level, means having the curiosity to ask good questions and the courage to act on where the answers lead. That requires a culture change among us humans.
In the age of artificial intelligence, you could even call this a survival strategy.
This article first appeared in Ad-verse Reactions, a newsletter written by independent journalist and consultant Omar Oakes, covering the economics, power structures and unintended consequences shaping advertising and media. You can subscribe to Ad-verse Reactions for regular analysis at omaroakes.substack.com.
