Strategic thinking is apparently the skill in shortest supply in the marketing profession.
Seventy-two percent of respondents to a poll conducted in Q2 2026 by the WFA and Mediasense said strategic thinking was scarce.
Data strategy and execution was ranked as the next most hard-to-come-by talent (46%), followed by insight development (36%) and then marketing fundamentals (34%).
What the results suggest, say the authors, is that the industry is desperate for skills that ‘enable better decision-making across increasingly complex marketing environments.’
By combining this data on skills gaps with respondents’ views on which expertise will be the most vital in the future, the report predicts that the most critical capabilities will be AI fluency and data-driven decision-making, along with strategic judgement.
The poll comprised 166 respondents working in brands, agencies, platforms and other marketing organisations, mostly from across EMEA and North America, with just over half of the respondents working brand side.
If you take into account the likely sampling variability in the poll, clients and agencies largely agree on where the gaps exist. The only real divergence between them concerns data-driven strategy and decision making, which clients are more worried about than agencies.
A few implications stick out from this admittedly quite small sample of data. The first is that agencies and marketers are by implication best equipped to execute tasks and strategies, which is precisely the thing being automated by AI and other technologies. The wrinkle here is that automating execution will also exacerbate the shortage of strategic thinking, if judgement and expertise are only learned from experience of carrying out tasks at the operational layer.
Advertisers are probably right to be more concerned than agencies about the skills gap, too. Brands tend to offer more stability and career progression than agencies, and they are great places to attain deep knowledge about a business, as well as stakeholder management skills, but they are less suited to developing the kind of broad understanding that lends itself to strategic thinking.
Agencies, by contrast, are in a better position to provide talent with more varied work and more freedom to try new things. These conditions make agencies the ideal incubators for the kind of strategic thinking and tech savvy that brands need, but they are increasingly under threat within network agencies, in particular.
The WFA and Mediasense are right to point out the importance of incentive systems within brands and agencies in bridging skills gaps. But the incentives that advertisers give agencies may matter more.
At a dinner I attended this week (hosted under the Chatham House Rule) an agency leader said he had never known marketers to be more ‘cowed’ by procurement departments than they are today, and that across the board clients are asking for a 30% reduction in fees because of assumed AI efficiencies — a figure that he said was based on information published in an Economist article.
Procurement teams will dispute this, of course. A seasoned consultant I spoke with yesterday dismissed the idea that marketers are cowed by procurement as rubbish, and said that the discipline is often unfairly maligned for executing the wishes of other departments (eg, finance).
Either way, the likely upshot of all this should be obvious. To protect their margins, squeezed agencies will be forced to become efficiency machines that churn out minimum-viable work. That will mean fewer opportunities for the talent within agencies to develop the kind of holistic knowledge they need to become valuable advisors to brands, or to play around with new technologies enough to become fluent in them, which, in turn, will only worsen the industry’s talent drought.
Then again, if strategic thinking is as scarce as the WFA’s poll suggests, it might not be that obvious.
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