In the age of instant answers, planning and strategy matter more than ever
Opinion | The Future of Planning, Strategy and Innovation Week in Focus
The future of media will be won by asking better questions, connecting evidence with human behaviour and having the conviction to make fewer, more meaningful decisions, writes the IPA’s Simon Frazier.
Let’s start by saying media isn’t becoming impossible to navigate, but it is impossible to navigate well without great planners and strategists.
There is a scene in The Wizard of Oz where Toto (Dorothy’s canine companion) pulls back the curtain and reveals that the apparently all-powerful Wizard is actually just a man operating levers and speaking into a tube (pictured). It is a useful lesson for the media industry in 2026: never confuse the appearance of authority with the presence of understanding.
Often, we find ourselves surrounded by increasingly confident answers where AI can analyse information, generate recommendations, and deliver a beautifully structured media strategy before you have finished making a cup of tea. But speed is not the same as wisdom, and something that sounds convincing is not necessarily correct.
To borrow from Woody in Toy Story, sometimes “it’s not flying. It is just falling with style”.
This is precisely why planning and strategy are becoming more essential to the future of media, not less.
The eighth edition of the IPA publication: Making Sense – The Commercial Media Landscape 2026, powered by IPA TouchPoints data, presents an industry undergoing considerable change, but not necessarily the wholesale revolution suggested by some of our more excitable conference slides.
The technologies and delivery systems have changed dramatically, yet the underlying shape of the media day remains remarkably consistent. People still want to watch, listen, read, discover, connect and occasionally switch off from the world altogether. The needs remain constant, but the routes to satisfying them have multiplied.
That distinction matters because complexity is too often mistaken for decline. Linear television reach has fallen, but video has not disappeared. Live radio’s share has reduced, but commercial audio’s overall share has grown. Print consumption has declined, but appetite for news and magazine content continues across online publishing, social media, and video; ultimately, media is not dying but changing state.
The future therefore does not belong to those who identify one winning channel but to those who understand how channels work together.
Fragmentation needs orchestration
I’ve mentioned this before, but the modern media plan should be less like one-hit wonders – Rick Astley and Chesney Hawkes (no offence) and more like a Glastonbury line-up whereby people may remember the headline act, but the value lies in the total experience: the combination of performers, stages, discoveries and shared moments that makes the whole weekend greater than any single set.
The same is true of media. No platform can fulfil every role or capture every context. Making Sense – The Commercial Media Landscape 2026 shows that OOH remains the only commercial medium consistently exceeding 90% weekly reach, while advertiser-funded commercial SVOD now reaches 36% of GB adults each week.
Commercial television continues to provide significant scale, even as social, online video, audio and digital publishing create new routes to audiences.
The IPA Media Planning and Strategy Summit 2026 was deliberately built around this challenge, bringing together planners, strategists, effectiveness specialists and channel experts to examine fragmentation, award-winning effectiveness, cinema’s role and agency strategy in the AI age.
The range of subjects was itself the point: the future cannot be understood through a single platform, dataset or planning philosophy.
Great planners act as conductors. They understand when an instrument should lead, when it should support and when it should remain silent – like the great BB King, the real emotions lay not in the notes he played, but the notes he chose to let linger or not play at all.
More channels do not automatically produce a better plan, in the same way that adding another 12 tambourine players does not necessarily improve the output of an orchestra – unless it’s a philharmonic version of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man, of course.
Planning turns availability into attention
The key thing to remember is that reach hasn’t vanished, but attention has become harder to coordinate.
Commercial media still accounts for 68% of adults’ curated media time, compared with 66% in 2015. Yet people increasingly consume it alone: the share of commercial media time spent alone rose from 40% to 44%, and 16-to-34-year-olds spend 21% more of their commercial media time alone than in 2015.
The scary fact is that when we look at differences in solitary media consumption by gender, we see that men’s solitary media time has increased by 48% since 2015, adding an extra 48 minutes per day.
And in the context of Louis Theroux’s recent documentary on the rise of the manosphere, and with time spent talking face-to-face down 17 minutes per day over the same time period – in the absence of others around to say, as Sally Field did in Mrs Doubtfire, “what is this rubbish you’re watching, turn it off” that’s a pretty scary finding, which is having visible negative consequences.
This is not a small strategic complication, and I believe its impact is currently greatly overlooked. Shared media experiences create common knowledge and zeitgeist. They help brands become recognisable, discussable and culturally meaningful. As consumption becomes personalised and concurrent, planners must work harder to create connection across separate encounters.
That requires more than optimising impressions. It requires understanding the purpose of each encounter, the audience’s mindset, the device being used, and the role of the creative.
A 60-second story on a television in the living room is not the same experience as a six-second video on a smartphone during the morning commute. Both may be labelled “video”, but treating them as interchangeable is like claiming a postcard and a novel are the same because both contain words.
Strategy helps us see the opportunities we overlook
Planning and strategy are also essential because data and AI combined really just reinforce preexisting biases, and ultimately people must ask the questions that reveal what averages conceal.
The clearest example is age. The industry has spent years pursuing younger audiences while routinely treating everyone over 55 as a single, largely analogue group – we even did this ourselves over seven editions of Making Sense.
Yet this year’s report shows substantial digital growth among both 55-to-74s and those aged 75 and over. Commercial online news reach among 55-to-74s has risen by 469% since 2015.
Among people aged 75+, commercial live and recorded television still reaches 90% weekly, but online news, BVoD, other online video and digital audio are all creating additional opportunities.
If anything, the opportunities among these audiences have never been absent, but I don’t think it’s too outlandish to say that, for the most part, our curiosity has been.
AI can accelerate the work, but it cannot choose what matters
AI will undoubtedly improve planning. It can process datasets, identify patterns and remove laborious tasks. Used well, it is an extraordinary multimixer for the industry. But of course, nobody buys a milkshake because they admire the machine’s efficiency. They buy it because the ingredients are good.
Rory Sutherland once said (in slightly stronger language) that “rubbish delivered at the speed of light is still rubbish”, and that becomes even more pertinent as delivery speeds increase with AI.
For media, these vital ingredients remain human judgement, curiosity, creativity, empathy and conviction. AI, powered by good data, can tell us what has happened, but ultimately you need great human-driven strategy to determine whether it matters.
The future of media will not be won by producing more answers more quickly. It will be won by asking better questions, connecting evidence with human behaviour and having the conviction to make fewer, more meaningful decisions.
In a world overflowing with confident Wizards, we need more people willing to be Toto and pull back the curtain.
Simon Frazier is the associate director and head of marketing, data innovation and The Making Sense unit at The IPA.