STRATEGY IN AN AGE OF CHOICE
Choice. That is what strategy ultimately comes down to. A choice about what to do, and often more importantly, what not to do. A choice about what to prioritise in order to move towards long-term growth.
Across the industry, there is growing concern that strategy as a discipline is under increasing pressure, particularly in markets such as the UK. Much of this stems from short-term commercial demands and a persistent misunderstanding of what effectiveness actually means.
The irony is that we have never known more about advertising effectiveness than we do today. We have never had clearer evidence on how brands grow, how profit is created, and which levers matter most. The fundamentals are well established. The challenge is not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of focus and conviction in applying it.
As we move into 2026, we believe there are three strategic choices that marketers can, and should, make to deliver stronger outcomes for their brands and businesses.
#1 Go Big or Go Home
This phrase is borrowed from a recent paper by Les Binet and the IPA, which reinforces a long-standing truth: the two biggest drivers of advertising success remain attentive reach and sufficient budget.
The evidence is clear. To have a meaningful chance of success, campaigns need scale. In practical terms, this means reaching approximately 100 million attentive impressions. It also means setting the right budget levels. In fact, budget setting is around eight times more influential on outcomes than optimisation. Even the best creative ideas fail when they are not properly supported.
This does not mean brands need to spend more. But it does mean they need to do less with the budgets they already have. Too many brands are trying to communicate too many things at once, spreading investment thinly across multiple messages and objectives. When 85% of ads receive less than two seconds of attention, dilution is the enemy of effectiveness.
Consistency, clarity and scale matter more than ever. The more focus we can give to fewer priority campaigns, the greater the return on investment over time.
#2 Use Humour
Advertising is, by its nature, interruptive. It appears while people are trying to do something else. It intrudes into moments that were not designed for it. Most people would be perfectly happy if advertising disappeared altogether.
That reality places a responsibility on brands. As Martin Boase once observed, if we are going to invite ourselves into people’s lives, we have a duty not to bore them.
Humour remains one of the most powerful tools available to advertisers. It disarms, it creates warmth, and it builds likeability. People trust brands they like, and outside of habitual purchasing, they tend to prefer brands that make them smile.
In an environment defined by attention scarcity and emotional overload, humour is not frivolous. It is a strategic advantage. It signals empathy, self-awareness and respect for the audience. Used well, it creates faster emotional connections and more durable brand memories.
#3 Be AI-Forward, but Thinking-Led
Artificial intelligence is reshaping every industry, and advertising is no exception. It is already embedded in daily workflows, improving the speed of data analysis, enhancing performance optimisation, and accelerating creative development. We are encouraging our teams and clients to experiment with AI and to embrace its potential.
However, there is an important caveat: do not outsource the thinking.
AI remains a young technology. It still hallucinates. More importantly, its instinct is to reduce marketing to an efficiency and optimisation exercise. The risk of delegating too much, too soon, is that we fall back into a familiar trap: confusing efficiency with effectiveness.
Great advertising does not exist to maximise short-term ROI alone. It exists to grow margin, profitability and long-term brand value. This tension is not new, but recent data from the IPA suggests it is intensifying, with an increasing share of advertising investment skewing towards short-term activation. Left unchecked, AI could accelerate this trend further.
In an AI-enabled world, strategic clarity becomes more important, not less. Brands must be clear on their long-term positioning, the metrics that truly matter, and the human insights that drive creative leaps. These are not tasks that algorithms can own.
The brands that win in 2026 will be those that use AI to enhance execution and speed, while protecting the judgement, imagination and empathy that make advertising effective in the first place.
