Strategy at a crossroads: WARC report reveals the discipline’s identity crisis

The strategic function within advertising agencies is facing an inflection point. According to WARC’s The Future of Strategy 2025 report, 80% of strategists worldwide believe their discipline is “at a crossroads”, even as client demand for clear strategic guidance reaches new highs.

The contradiction, the report notes, stems from how agencies treat strategy as expendable while brands increasingly depend on it to navigate uncertainty.

Released on 6 October 2025, the annual WARC study draws on responses from 1,127 strategists across the world, most of whom are agency-side. It combines survey findings with interviews from industry practitioners, painting a global picture of a profession struggling to define its future amid economic pressures, technological shifts, and evolving client expectations.

“Agency-side strategists feel their discipline is at a crossroads and all too often is treated as expendable,” says Lena Roland, content director at WARC Strategy. “Agency-side strategy needs to rebrand, focusing on helping clients identify where and how to grow.”

The strategy paradox

The study’s central finding, dubbed ‘the strategy paradox’, highlights a sharp disconnect. While 80% of strategists see their discipline at a turning point, 62% believe strategy is among the first functions to be cut when budgets tighten. Meanwhile, client appetite for strategic thinking remains robust.

Only 31% of respondents expect headcount in strategy teams to grow in the next year, down from 47% in 2024. This contraction comes at a time when brands are facing heightened volatility and ambiguity.

“The economic housing of strategy is coming apart, which is strange because the demand for it is as high as ever,” observes Tom Morton, founder of strategy consultancy Narratory Capital.

Others attribute the decline to risk aversion. Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer at VML North America, notes, “We’ve become risk averse, and our clients have become risk averse... 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.”

The growing perception of strategy as a “luxury” has led many strategists to consider leaving agency life. The report finds that more strategists — across junior, mid and senior levels — are eyeing client-side or consultancy roles. Nearly one in four of the most experienced strategists expect their next move to be into consulting.

AI: Catalyst or threat?

Artificial intelligence continues to polarise strategists. Nearly half (46%) disagree that AI will erode their value, though 37% believe it could learn one of the strategist’s most prized abilities, which is making intuitive leaps.

Over the past year, 76% of strategists reported a significant increase in the use of AI tools, especially in North America (85%), followed by Asia (74%) and Europe (69%). Most are using AI to accelerate tasks such as competitor analysis (66%), brief development (51%), and cultural insight generation (42%).

“The challenge for strategists is not to resist AI, nor to blindly embrace it, but to partner with it,” says Oliver Feldwick, chief innovation officer at T&P. “This is not about abdicating our role. It’s about evolving it. Reclaiming strategy from the grind and rediscovering the joy of thought.”

AI’s growing role in research is also reshaping insight generation. Use of synthetic data has risen to 38%, up from 32% last year.

Yet strategists caution that overreliance on AI risks flattening originality and cultural nuance. Around 61% see lack of originality as AI’s biggest limitation, followed closely by lack of emotional resonance (60%).

Human-led research, the report concludes, remains the antidote to the ‘average’. Strategists are positioning themselves as ‘guardians of reality’, responsible for grounding ideas in lived experience rather than algorithmic inference.

Beyond frameworks

If data and automation risk making strategy too procedural, the report argues that creativity and empathy must pull it back to its core purpose. Many respondents called for fewer frameworks and more lateral, imaginative thinking.

Joseph Burns, strategy lead at Quality Meats Creative, says, “Strategy regains relevance when it stops polishing symmetry and starts opening up advantages: gaps in understanding, in access, and in timing.”

Steve Walls, planner at Moon Rabbit, adds, “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 and truth.”

The report makes a case for rebranding strategy as a core growth function rather than a support service. In today’s complex marketplace, strategists’ ability to simplify chaos, identify growth levers and apply human judgment is becoming increasingly valuable.

“We have to rebrand strategy; not as a back-office function, not as a luxury, but as a service: clear, accountable, and indispensable,” says Tomas Gonsorcik, global chief strategy officer at BBH. “Strategy should operate as a standalone service inside the agency. Its primary customers are creatives and CMOs, and its purpose is to deliver growth clarity, not just decks.”

According to the report, the biggest opportunities for strategists lie in helping clients navigate volatility in their categories (52%) and complexity within the media landscape (45%).

Reclaiming relevance

Underlying WARC’s findings is an identity crisis that runs deeper than headcount or budgets. Strategy, once the intellectual heartbeat of agencies, is now being squeezed between operational efficiency and creative execution.

Roland says the report’s intent is to spark reflection rather than pessimism. “Our annual Future of Strategy report acts as a temperature check for how strategists are feeling about the state of the discipline. It explores the challenges in agency strategy, and the rise of independent strategists. It looks at the impact of AI and the importance of human-led research.”

While many strategists agree that the discipline must evolve, few dispute its necessity. The report positions the next phase of strategic practice as one that blends analytical rigour with human intuition — an approach that not only navigates uncertainty but shapes it.

In a marketplace increasingly driven by automation and short-term metrics, the strategist’s role may yet prove indispensable — provided agencies rediscover the value of thinking, not just doing.

As Morton puts it, the challenge is not whether strategy survives, but whether it adapts fast enough to remain the industry’s “compass” rather than its afterthought.