Will ‘media planner’ still be a job title in 10 years? Nine specialists weigh in

AI is changing media planning at speed. Tasks that once demanded hours of human analysis are increasingly automated, while planners are being asked to bring more strategic, commercial and cultural thinking to the table.

So, what does that mean for the media planner of the future? Will ‘media planner’ still be a job title in 10 years’ time, and which decisions should never be handed over to a machine?

We asked senior agency planners what the role needs to become, what should remain resolutely human, and what planners need to know now to stay ahead of the change.

Contributors include:

• Caroline Tucker, joint head of planning, the7stars
• Sarah Macaulay, comms planning director, Craft Media
• Hattie Sumner, senior planning manager, Craft Media
• David Wilding, EVP strategy, WPP Media
• Rob Laurence, head of Adwanted Connected, Adwanted UK
• Chetan Murthy, group head of strategy & effectiveness, Havas Media Network
• Vicky Marshall, head of client, Talon UK
• Lin-Sze Teh, chief planning officer, Starcom
• Jess Talbot, head of planning, Medialab

In 10 years, will ‘media planner’ still be a job title, or will it have been absorbed into something else?

The planners who thrive will be those who can combine technology with a deep understanding of people and business needs.

 

Caroline Tucker, the7stars: “Even right now I don’t think this title is fit for purpose – as it doesn’t do justice to the many hats a planner wears or the complexity of the role in 2026. The role continues to expand, and the value we offer is increasingly not ‘how to plan media channels’ but how we develop strategies to deliver growth for clients across Paid, Owned, Earned, and Machines (what we’re coining ‘POEM’ at the7stars). Knowing the media industry, some agencies might experiment with titles like “growth president”, but ideally, we’ll land on something sensible such as “marketing strategists” or “marketing planners”

Chetan Murthy, Havas Media Network: “In a practical sense, the title is the one thing that doesn’t need to change. How we define what ‘planning’ is fundamentally will, though.

“Around 75% of media investment is already automated through AI and algorithmically-enabled platforms. Clearly, the traditional media planner’s role in making media investment decisions is diminishing. Conversely, I think strategy, planning, and effectiveness will come closer together, with the role eventually collapsing into one.

“The concern is for this hybrid role to become commoditised through platforms, automated and optimised by algorithms. Efficient, but soulless. A plan with no fingerprints on it. Lacking craft, creativity, and bravery. The stuff that creates true competitive advantage.

“But the more AI is dynamically optimising investment, whilst flattening plans to the mean, the more it matters that the ‘media planner’ defines the business objectives properly, sets the parameters for investment, and creates the blueprints for ideas to travel rather than within rigid media plans.

“The title won’t change. But the role stops being ‘build the plan’ and starts being ‘decide what the plan is for, and how the idea carries the competitive advantage’.”

Lin-Sze Teh, Starcom: “10 years? That’s a long time. Who knows what the title will be , but planning will still exist.

“Our industry is entirely centred on selling products and services to people. What won’t change is that humans are emotional and motivated by different things across different moments. What people want from brands, what drives their decisions and routes to purchase, will continue to shift with culture, technology and trends.

“What I do think will change is the role itself. The industry’s view of “media” and a planner’s role needs a serious update. The smartest businesses and planners already think about media within the context of commerce, creators, content, culture and measurement, not in isolation.

“Planners will become far more technology- and tool-enabled, which will create more space to dive deeper into understanding people’s motivations, not just attention or visibility. And use data to push creativity and inform how brands show up in the world.

“Senior planners will transition into consultative and future-focused roles. Less centred on campaign planning and more focused on helping clients identify growth opportunities across their business. For clients, I predict we will also see more integration and fewer silos within their organisational structures, which will be the biggest factor in shaping how planning will look in 10 years.”

Vicky Marshall, Talon UK: “I think the title will still exist and planners will remain a critical part of building successful campaigns, but as technology evolves, so too will the role itself. Innovations like AI will continue to take away the heavy lifting of admin tasks, analyse data, and improve efficiencies, so planners will have more time to focus on higher-value strategic thinking.

“This will remain particularly important in OOH, which continues to be a uniquely human and community-led channel. Understanding how people move in the real world, what captures their attention and how brands show up in public spaces will still be a fundamentally human skill. Brands will always need people who can connect business challenges with effective media solutions. In fact, the more automated media becomes, the more valuable human judgement, creativity and critical thinking are likely to be.

“The planners who thrive will be those who can combine technology with a deep understanding of people and business needs.”

Sarah Macaulay, Craft Media: “There’s a world in 10 years where a machine AI media planner just churns out deliverables and data, but if we’re talking about human media planners then I think the role will be evolved, not absorbed.

“I see the call from clients to work with those who are seeing the ‘broader picture ’-whether that’s the broader picture of the media landscape, of the brand category or the product strategy. A media planner can do all these things and more, and so long as we’re planning across all touchpoints that have the ability to communicate, and not just paid squares and circles, then I still see the role existing.”

Jess Talbot, Medialab: “The title on the team sheet may evolve, but the core craft of media planning isn’t going anywhere. If anything, I believe it’s about to enter its golden era. Agency titles may naturally shift as skill sets, client needs, and operational tools evolve. But underneath the nomenclature, the fundamental mandate of media planning should remain: understanding human behaviour and knowing how to influence it.

“What is changing – and rapidly – is the behavioural focus of planners. We are moving away from siloed, platform-by-platform planning toward designing integrated media systems, where data, creative, and channel dynamics reinforce one another across the entire customer journey, with the old comforts and rules of yesterday’s planning applying less in today’s landscape.

“The recent IPA figures revealed a reassuring and significant sustained increase in planning and strategy roles across media agencies. In an era dominated by changing audience behaviour, fragmented consumption, assimilation of AI, automated buying, and algorithmic execution, clients aren’t asking for more operators – they want strategic minds who can make sense of it all. Whether it’s ‘media/comms planner’, ‘systems architect’, or ‘strategic orchestrator’, the media planner role remains a distinct and indispensable craft.”

What’s the one planning decision you would never let AI make, and why?

The leap.  Every great strategy involves jumping into untested waters, and I wouldn’t let AI do that for me.

 

Vicky Marshall, Talon UK: “There are some decisions that should stay firmly in human hands, especially when it comes to understanding people and culture. One is the judgement around creative context. AI is great at spotting patterns and learning from what has worked before, but it doesn’t always understand brand ambition, emotion or real-world context.

“A good example is some of the early AI image generation tools, where searches for “CEO” or “engineer” would often generate results featuring only men, while jobs such as “nurse” were most likely to show women or minorities. The technology reflected patterns in its training data rather than challenging them or understanding changing cultural context, and media planning tools will have the same limitations. That’s why human judgement remains so important. We can recognise cultural moments, understand nuance and think about how people will actually feel and react.

“Successful planning isn’t just about reaching people in the right place but in the right mindset. Data can tell us what’s likely to work based on past behaviour, but it can’t always tell us what’s right for a brand today. Human judgement is still needed to balance the numbers with context, creativity and common sense.

Chetan Murthy, Havas Media Network: “The leap. Every great strategy involves jumping into untested waters, and I wouldn’t let AI do that for me.

“AI is brilliant at data synthesis. But strategy isn’t just data distillation; it’s a creative act. It takes what we know, and uses it to imagine somewhere we haven’t been yet. That’s a different skill set. It needs imagination, not just information.

“Data often only really tells you about the past, what’s worked, what’s not and why. The future can be modelled but the only certainty is change. Markets shift, politics shift, the plan is already out of date the moment it’s signed off. Real breakthroughs, by definition, sit outside the proven and safe. If the answer was already visible in observable data, it wouldn’t be a breakthrough; it would be a benchmark.”

Rob Laurence, Adwanted UK: “All of them. AI should be viewed as an aid to thinking, and to help with some of the heavy lifting, but it shouldn’t be left to make its own decisions about media investment. Think about how you use AI day to day. It’s an amazing starting point, but you’ll almost always check and fine-tune the output.

“Why would we ever treat media investment decisions differently?

“They need to be based on robust, independent and trustworthy data from the JICs, big data from CRMs and consumers’ digital footprints, along with the agency’s own proprietary data sources and planning tools.

“They also need to draw on the unique experience of the agency and their planners who know the nuances of what works for one brand and doesn’t for another. They know what can impact a reach curve. They know how channels can support each other. This, along with their expertise in using the data available, creates one of the USPs for the agency and their clients. AI can augment all of this, but if left to make the media investment decisions, we’ll end up with a lot of very similar plans out there.”

Hattie Sumner, Craft Media: “The one planning decision I’d never hand to AI is judging whether something is tasteful, cool, relevant, or scary. That’s a personal view, held by every individual on the planet, and it’s different for every person on the planet, and no algorithm gets to decide it for me.

“The most important planning decision you’ll make (the one you could argue every other decision hinges on) is your key insight into who your customers actually are. A great planner digs for the most interesting, unique, or downright strange thing about their audience, and uses it, alongside their lived experience, to make them feel truly seen by the brand. Your brand is never more successful than when it genuinely understands and connects with its audience. The deeper that understanding goes, the more relevant and useful you become to them. AI will never replicate the distinctly human feeling of relating to Bridget Jones and her Spanx, or of buying advent calendars in September because you don’t trust yourself to save the money by December – hoarding the gifts is easier than hoarding the budget. I personally am not going to let a robot dictate what’s cool, because I trust my own intuition, built over seven million years of human instinct.”

Jess Talbot, Medialab: “The one planning decision I would never hand over to AI is defining the strategic core of a campaign.

“AI generally operates on averages, is trained on historical data to predict the next logical answer. It is fundamentally built to satisfy a user’s prompt, it may tell you what you want to hear or what worked today and risks driving a brand toward a homogenous middle.

“That’s not to say AI doesn’t bring a wealth of opportunity and value. However, I often look at brilliant advertising campaigns and think – could AI do that? We all know the lightning speed at which AI capabilities are evolving and how much AI is now integrated into media planning. Could an algorithm ever have conceived the strategic thinking behind Cadbury’s Gorilla? Could it have predicted that killing off Duolingo’s mascot would spark viral obsession? Or single-handedly orchestrate it’s way to an Effectiveness Award win? At the moment, I don’t believe so.

“So, I would leave strategic thinking to the strategic minds, using AI to automate what’s routine and free up time for planners to create the remarkable.”

What does a brilliant planner need to know in 2026 that they didn’t need to know five years ago?

Always channel Sir John Hegarty and zig when others zag.

David Wilding, WPP Media: “(We probably did need to know this five years ago too, but) it’s never been more important for planners to be able to speak the language of business. Not just ‘growth’ (and definitely not just ‘ROI’) but margins, pricing, capital allocation and things like that. How many of us can make the case for why £10m invested in advertising is a better use of a company’s resources than the same money invested elsewhere?”

Rob Laurence, Adwanted UK: “Planners have more sources, dashboards and AI-generated outputs than ever, and they don’t all agree. A brilliant planner in 2026, more than ever, needs to know where a number comes from, how it was measured and whether it can be compared with the one next to it. Some things haven’t changed. Whether it was five years ago or fifty years ago, a brilliant planner still needs to know how to be curious, as that’s what will set them apart from the crowd, and what the competitors are doing. Always channel Sir John Hegarty and zig when others zag.”

Caroline Tucker, the7stars: “Honestly – bloody everything. Today, planners need to know every new emerging platform, all the new tools and tech, retail media, creators, measurement, data, yet still need to be creative, manage projects and manage relationships with clients whose budgets are shrinking and have their own Board breathing down their necks for daily ROAS figures.

“The job has got so much harder. But the biggest shift is in the environment they’re operating in. We now plan in what Billy Ryan brilliantly describes as an “Age of Abundance”. Audiences have never had more choice, more content or more places to spend their attention. The result is fragmentation on a scale we’ve never seen before. And planners need to not only know how to navigate this, but also how to help brands win in this complex context.”

Lin-Sze Teh, Starcom: “I always compare a planner’s role to that of an orchestra conductor.

“Our instruments are media channels, technology, data, content and tools. I think of AI as a brilliant sound engineer. They are there to help us create a beautiful symphony that drives ticket sales, but you still need to understand the raw power of each section, how it sounds, what it’s capable of and where its limitations are if you want to create something interesting, unexpected that people are willing to pay to experience.

“The industry is changing at such a rapid pace that to ignore technology, or resist it rather than put it in service to us, is to risk being left behind.

“The people who do best are usually the ones who stay curious and lean into change rather than resist it. That’s always been true, but it’s become even more important now that the industry is evolving so quickly.”