Gareth Davies, UK Group CEO at Leagas Delaney, argues that amid AI disruption and shrinking budgets, strategy should be the creative industry’s loudest voice.
‘If you don’t speak, someone will speak on your behalf.’
It’s a maxim that Tim Delaney holds close and one that I hear regularly from him. It is, naturally, a point well made. All brands should aim to be part of ‘the conversation’. But in today’s fragmented media landscape, simply speaking up is not enough to guarantee being heard. So, what’s your strategy to get heard?
Now, this is not an article on the science of media planning and buying. I’ll leave that to those who are more qualified to crunch those particular data sets. Instead, my interest lies in the choices brands can take to meaningfully connect with their audiences. Of course, finding your voice is a lot easier with a healthy budget in your back pocket. However, as important as it is to have the means to command a presence, having a big budget should not be confused with having a clear strategy. Enough well-funded ideas have hit the rocks of ROI over the years to be certain of that.
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What better way to build a strategy than through a team of whip-smart strategic thinkers? In a world in which AI continues to threaten to eat the lunch of agencies, it should be our strategic prowess, along with our creativity, that sets our industry apart. These two disciplines, beyond all others, define our value. We are specialists, or should be, in understanding the wants and needs of our audiences and then finding creative (literally) ways for brands to connect with them.
It is troubling, therefore, to hear fresh concerns about the future of the discipline of strategy and of strategic thinking more broadly. WARC’s recent The Future of Strategy 2025 report paints a bleak picture, with 80% of strategists believing that strategy is at a crossroads and 62% agreeing that it is treated as expendable.
Writing on the same topic for WARC, Siddhant Lahiri, head of strategy at Forsman & Bodenfors Asia, called out the growing ‘invisibility of the strategist’. “More and more, advertising strategists are becoming invisible in the advertising process,” said Lahiri. “Many agencies are operating without strategy teams, some outsource strategy to regional resources, and others only employ strategists on a freelance basis.”
All of which seems counterintuitive.
If anything, surely this should be the golden age of strategy, not the retrenchment of this storied discipline? After all, strategy, in both its narrowest and widest sense, seems our best answer to the AI land grab. Strategy should be flexing its muscles across every detail of our industry. WARC’s report concurs: “Synthetic data offers more potential routes to insight. But as everyone uses the same tools, there may be even greater value in human-led research to move brands beyond the average. Strategists have a key role to play in rooting ideas in the real.”
Doesn’t that sound exactly what we all need? The best people I have worked with understand that strategy is everything in a creative agency. Creatives know that they can’t move without it. And the most ambitious clients know, and push for, the possibilities that a clear strategy can unlock.
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We lose this focus at our peril. Agencies were once warned to “be careful, your strategy is showing”. At the time, this was a rebuke for a creative response that was too workmanlike, too literal. How about we reclaim and reimagine this once familiar phrase? Instead, let’s make sure that our strategy is showing — in every decision we take on behalf of the brands we work with. Surely that has to be the best way to get your voice heard?