The Strategy Paradox: Why Marketing's Most Vital Function Is Being Hollowed Out
Strategy headcount has collapsed from 52% growth to 27% in three years. Agencies bundle it as a "gift with purchase." And fear of bland work now outranks fear of AI as the profession's biggest threat
80% of strategists worldwide believe their discipline stands at a crossroads, and 62% say it is treated as expendable when budgets tighten yet client demand for strategic guidance has never been higher. This paradox sits at the heart of WARC’s 2025 Future of Strategy report, which surveyed 1,127 strategists in August and unpacks a profession under strain just as complexity and volatility make it indispensable.
Strategy headcount has collapsed. Not declined collapsed. In 2022, 52% of strategists reported team growth. This year? Twenty-seven per cent. Next year looks worse: only 31% expect growth, while the share predicting cuts has doubled to 14%.
The best people are leaving. Junior strategists, mid-level strategists, senior strategists all now see their next role on the client side rather than in an agency. A quarter of the most experienced practitioners expect to land in a consultancy. Not Ogilvy or Wieden+Kennedy. McKinsey or Bain.
And why wouldn’t they? The business model is absurd. Agencies still bill most strategy work by the hour rate cards, timesheets, the whole apparatus even though nobody thinks this makes sense. Strategy gets thrown in as a “gift with purchase” when clients buy media or creative. It is the free toy in the cereal box.
Tom Morton founded his own strategy consultancy, Narratory Capital, after years as Global CSO at R/GA. He has watched this happen in real time. “The economic housing of strategy is coming apart,” he says, “which is strange because the demand for it is as high as ever.”
He is right about the demand. Brands are drowning. They face category disruption, fragmented media, polarised consumers, algorithms they do not understand, and a culture of risk aversion that makes everyone terrified to do anything interesting. 52% of strategists say the biggest opportunity is helping clients navigate this chaos. 47% say the biggest threat is fear of risk-taking that leads to bland work.
Think about that. The biggest opportunity and the biggest threat are the same thing.
Ellie Bamford, Chief Strategy Officer at VML North America, has a theory about why this is happening. “We’ve become risk averse, and our clients have become risk averse,” she says. “We are hiding behind mountains of data and research, and we’re not coming out strongly enough with our point of view. And that’s diminishing our value.”
This is the paradox. Clients desperately need strategy. Agencies employ fewer strategists, pay them badly, and bundle their work for free. The strategists who stay produce averse-decks that no one believes in. Everyone is miserable. And all the while, the industry pats itself on the back for being data-driven.
The AI Dream and the Bland Reality
76%of strategists now use AI tools regularly. In North America, that figure jumps to 85%. They use it to speed up competitor analysis, draft briefs faster, gather cultural insights. Two-thirds claim they have reallocated the time saved to “deeper strategic thinking.”
Right. And what does that deeper thinking produce? When strategists name AI’s biggest limitation, 61% say lack of originality. Sixty per cent say lack of cultural nuance. In other words, AI helps them work faster to produce ideas that feel generic and culturally flat.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is that strategists have started to think like the technology. Oliver Feldwick, Chief Innovation Officer at T&P, puts it plainly: “The danger isn’t that AI is becoming more like us it’s that we’ve become more like it. Unquestioning. Formulaic. Predictable.”
Here is the bind. Nearly half of strategists (46%) disagree that AI will erode their value. But when asked if AI will eventually learn to take strategic leaps the intuitive, lateral jumps that separate good strategy from bad—37% say yes, 34% say no. So: confident about their future, unsure about their edge.
Use of synthetic data has crept up from 32% to 38% in a year. 4% now use it extensively. The appeal is obvious. You do not have to leave your desk. You do not have to talk to real people. You get instant personas, rapid segmentation, tidy clusters. The danger is equally obvious. Everyone uses the same tools. Everyone gets the same average answer.
Cecelia Parrish, Principal at Rival, thinks this is a disaster. “Anyone can churn out a neat synthesis,” she says. “But AI can’t find the emotion that moves people or the distinction that inspires a creative team.” Her prescription? Lean into the mess. Shop the aisles. Listen to interviews. Read the Substacks and Discord threads. Watch what your audience watches, even when you cannot stand it.
“These things are meant to be hard. That’s the point.”
Make the hard things easy, she says, and you strip strategy of the very thing that makes it valuable. Feldwick agrees. Let AI handle the grunt work the 50 bad ideas. Save human judgment for finding the 51st.
The Gap
Strategists are four times as likely to use synthetic data on a weekly basis as they are to conduct face-to-face ethnographic research. Read that again.
Mark Hadfield, founder of Meet the 85%, calls this the “Reality Gap.” Brands operate without emotional or geographic proximity to the people they serve. They rely on dashboards, synthetic personas, and Zoom calls. Then they wonder why their strategies feel like they were written by a committee that has never left Zone 1.
Real research, the kind where you sit in someone’s kitchen and notice what they do not say surfaces the nods, winks, glances that never show up in data. “It’s often what people don’t say that changes the brief, inspires the creative leap, or unlocks a new product idea,” Hadfield says. “Strategies become bolder when they’re backed by lived human truths, not just statistical probability.”
But hardly anyone does it anymore. On a daily basis, 69% of strategists do desk research and 55% use AI tools. In-person qualitative work? Rare.
It gets worse. Diversity, equity and inclusion practices have fallen off a cliff. Only 19% of teams now have hiring targets for diverse talent, down from 29% last year. So: less real-world research, less diverse teams, more reliance on synthetic data. And strategists sit in meetings wondering why everything feels generic.
The Symmetry Trap
Fear of bland work is now the top threat to the discipline—47%—ahead of AI commoditisation (41%). Strategists are not worried about being replaced by machines. They are worried about becoming machines.
Joseph Burns, Strategy Lead at Quality Meats Creative, thinks the discipline has lost sight of what it is for. Strategy is supposed to create asymmetric advantage. Make the fight unfair. Win by cheating (legally). Instead, teams pursue what Burns calls “efficiency symmetry” the same research, the same decks, the same channel plans, the same best practices—and try extremely hard to do them a bit better, a bit faster, a bit cheaper.
“Everyone is doing the same things and using the same tools.” The result? Bland average.
Real strategy hunts for gaps. Insights no one else has (because you did research they did not do). Access competitors cannot get (distribution, channels, communities they cannot reach). Timing others cannot match (moving faster, or slower, or at a rhythm that disorients the competition).
Burns: “Strategy regains relevance when it stops polishing symmetry and starts opening up advantages.”
Steve Walls, planner at Moon Rabbit, is even more withering. He calls the industry’s obsession with “insight” a crutch for the terminally unimaginative. The best strategists, he says, are not the ones with the quickest answers. They are the ones who make space for better answers. “Planning needs to stop trying to be right and start trying to be useful. It needs to take leaps of faith and to convince others to follow it into the unknowable.”
Strategy should be infused with empathy, imagination, ambition, truth. Not frameworks. Artists do not use frameworks. They know who they are. They follow their instincts. They have a point of view. They do not fear being wrong they fear not trying what feels right.
And they play to win, not to avoid losing.
The Rebrand
Tomas Gonsorcik, Global Chief Strategy Officer at DDB, thinks there is a way out. Rebrand. Stop calling strategy a back-office function or a luxury. Make it a service standalone, billable, indispensable. Its customers are creatives and CMOs. Its product is growth clarity, not decks.
He calls it the BERN model, after Bill Bernbach. Four principles:
Business within the business. Strategy should operate as its own profit centre. Charge for it properly. Make it accountable.
Environment for decisions. Stop letting clients outsource problems they do not want to touch. Create conditions where they trust your counsel on the big calls, not just tactical asks.
Right-shape talent. Build an hourglass. Senior, experienced strategists at the top, consulting marketing leaders. A surge of younger, curious talent at the bottom, supercharged with AI. Depth of judgment meets breadth of experimentation.
Net positive outcomes. Articulate value in terms clients care about. Business growth. Category disruption. Pricing power. Not decks, not deliverables, not “thought leadership.”
Gonsorcik: “Clients need a compass, not more decks.”
Giacomo Groff, Managing Director at R/GA Brazil, pushes this further. Strategy should enable systems, not campaigns. Platforms that connect stories across channels. Consistency. Fluency. Strategy as infrastructure, not decoration. The systemic strategist works across three layers: foundation (knowing the business and customer), infrastructure (connective intelligence across platforms and behaviours), application (briefs, interfaces, content).
This is not about making ads. This is about designing how a brand works.
Dr Laura Weis at WPP talks about M-shaped talent people with deep expertise in multiple areas who act as connective tissue across an organisation. Blend commercial insight with systems thinking with technological literacy. In the age of AI, she argues, empathy and understanding become more valuable, not less. “AI is incapable of these deeper strategic and relationship skills.”
The Cliff Edge
Fewer strategists now agree that planning has gained influence with clients 41% this year versus 48% last year. Fewer agree it has gained influence inside their own agencies. The VUCA landscape volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity should be a strategist’s natural habitat. Simplify the complex. Cut through the noise. Have a point of view.
Instead: headcount down, talent leaving, compensation broken, work bland.
The path forward is not more frameworks. Not more AI-generated personas. It is fundamental skills. Curiosity. Humility. Better questions. Proximity to lived reality. Asymmetric advantage. Simplicity and clarity in a messy world.
It requires agencies to rebrand strategy as a service and to right-shape teams so depth of judgment meets breadth of experimentation. It requires strategists to stop hiding behind data and start having a point of view.
Demand for strategy has never been higher. Clients need partners who decode culture, orchestrate coherence, make the fight unfair.
The question is whether agencies will invest in that future—or whether the best talent will keep drifting away, leaving the discipline hollowed out just as it is needed most.
The numbers suggest the cliff edge is close.
