Written by Laura Braithwaite, Co Founder, Liberty Hive.

Last week I attended the APG / MPG event, kindly hosted at VCCP.

The MPG, Media Planning Group, is the new home for media planners and strategists at the heart of the APG. The APG (Account Planning Group), originally founded in 1979 to support account planners in advertising agencies, now extends further into communications and media planning, bringing media and creative closer together.

The MPG is a great initiative, entirely not for profit, and is being led voluntarily in their spare time by a steering committee of industry practitioners.

The MPG was born out of a simple but urgent conviction: that as technology continues to take centre stage, human input, ideas and critical thinking still need a stage too. And a concern that the craft skill that needs education, inspiration and discussion might be in danger of being lost for the current and next generation of planning talent. As the landscape changes faster than ever, with AI removing so much of the grunt work and planning teams continuing to diminish in size and scale, ensuring access to resources and experienced talent for new and emerging planners feels more important than ever.

The hot topic debated at the event? Whether the black box is the future of media planning. Differing opinions. Plenty to think about.

And one line that stuck with me (apologies, I can't remember who said it):

Can You Ride the Tech Wave Without Learning to Swim?

The Uncomfortable Truth About AI and Talent

AI has changed gears.

A generation of brilliant media planners, strategists, account directors and creatives are wondering what their career looks like in five years. At Liberty Hive, we sit at a unique vantage point. We see both sides of the market every single day; the clients hiring, and the talent looking.

On one side: genuine excitement. AI removes the grunt work. It compresses timelines. It gives small teams the reach of large ones. That's a real, meaningful shift and for the right people, a remarkable opportunity.

On the other side: real anxiety. Roles are changing faster than organisations can redefine them. Junior pipelines are under pressure. And there's a creeping sense, felt keenly by mid-level talent, that the skills they've spent years building might be devalued.

Part of what's driving that anxiety is the pressure from above, leaders, CFOs and shareholders increasingly expect AI to deliver measurable cost reductions and efficiency gains. That expectation is real, it's being acted on, and it's reshaping headcount decisions across the industry right now.

Both feelings are valid. Both are happening at the same time.

The Talent Pipeline Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

The models touted by some of the industry's biggest names, leaner senior teams, AI doing the heavy lifting, significant reductions in junior and support roles, are seductive on paper. Lower costs. Higher margins. Cleaner structures.

But who trains the next generation of senior people, if there are no junior roles?

The media and marketing industry has always been an apprenticeship business at its core. You learn by doing. By being in the room. Strip out that layer and you don't just lose headcount, you lose the mechanism by which expertise is transferred and the next generation is built.

The talent pipeline matters. And right now, it's under increasing pressure.

Why The MPG Matters

This is exactly why the launch of the Media Planning Group feels so timely and so necessary.

As Pippa Glucklich noted, the media planning role has been "underfunded, rushed and reduced to frameworks rather than applying quality, human thinking". At a moment when the industry risks automating before it educates, the MPG is doing something quietly radical: insisting that critical thinking is a skill worth developing, not a relic to be automated away.

You can use AI to do the work. But you need human judgement, critical thinking and genuine discussion to know whether the work is any good. To interrogate the output.

To push back on the brief. To know when the model is confidently wrong. That judgement only comes from having done the thinking yourself from having wrestled with a client's real problem, rather than letting an algorithm make the first pass.

What This Means for Hiring and What We're Doing About It

From where we sit, a few things are becoming clear.

The skills required are changing faster than job titles are. Briefs that would have been recognisable five years ago now require a fundamentally different profile, someone who thinks strategically and navigates the tools, interrogates data and communicates a point of view with clarity and conviction. The emerging unicorn isn't just a strategist or a technologist. It's both.

Human judgement is becoming more valuable, not less. As AI increases volume and speed across the industry, the differentiator will increasingly be quality of thinking, the ability to ask better questions, spot what's missing, and bring a perspective that a model can't manufacture. The planners and strategists who invest in that capability now will be the ones who thrive.

Community matters more than ever. As roles change and career paths become less linear, belonging to a community of peers, people navigating the same uncertainty, sharing the same questions, is genuinely protective. The APG has done this for strategists for over four decades. The MPG now does it for media planners. At Liberty Hive, our network of 5,000+ vetted industry professionals isn't a database. It's a community.

Excited. But Realistic.

We're at a genuine inflection point. And I don't think anyone fully knows how this plays out.

What I do know is that the companies and individuals who navigate this best won't be the ones who adopt AI fastest or cut costs most aggressively. They'll be the ones who combine genuine human expertise with the best of what technology can offer.

Who invested in the next generation rather than writing it off. Who kept the craft alive even as the tools changed around it.

Human Led. Tech Enabled. It's not just our positioning at Liberty Hive. It's what I believe the industry needs to hold onto, even as everything else shifts beneath it.

The MPG launching right now, at this exact moment, isn't a coincidence. It's the industry telling itself something important.

---

To find out more about the Media Planning Group and its training programme, events and community, visit https://www.apg.org.uk/mpg

Membership is open to all: agencies, media owners, clients, sole traders and anyone who wants to be part of a stimulating learning community.

The MPG has been assembled in partnership with the Account Planning Group by Pippa Glucklich, former Chief Executive of Starcom and Electric Glue and now a Non-Executive Director; David Wilding, Executive Vice-President, Strategy, at WPP Media; Sally Weavers, Co-founder of Craft Media London; James Shoreland, Chief Executive of VCCP Media; Paul Gayfer, Chief Strategy Officer at Goodstuff Communications; and Ben Cunningham, Media Director at IMA.

The APG, the Account Planning Group, has been the professional home for communications strategists in the UK since 1979. Find out more at https://www.apg.org.uk/mpg

Written by Laura Braithwaite, Co Founder, Liberty Hive.