At the turn of every year, we see lots of articles about what’s changing in the year ahead, and what we all might need to do to update ourselves to stay relevant. Marketing has always been overly obsessed with what’s now, what’s next, what’s fresh, what’s the thing. Old marketers (like me) need to work ever harder in a notoriously ageist industry to understand new formats, cultural shifts, and AI tools and tech. But while previously our competition was other brands, other agencies, younger people – this is the first year that many of us are competing with the actual tech itself.
So what are the capabilities that we need to revise, update, learn? At Flock we regularly speak to most of the world’s top agencies and marketing teams and – together with learnings from our Skills Assessment Tool – are able to gather and summarise what matters most. To avoid being duplicative and obvious, I have not included ‘AI’ as one of the capabilities. Suffice to say that how we organize around AI, GEO etc, is fundamental to everything we work on at Flock with our marketing clients, and as such lives through these rather than as a separate ‘skill’.
1. Orchestration
A hot industry topic for some years now is ‘bothism’, ‘the messy middle’ etc between brand and performance, but this has expanded. There is a growing need for orchestrators: people who can connect sales, brand, content, performance, product, and automation into one coherent customer experience. With AI speeding everything up, coordination, not creation becomes the real bottleneck. Some of our clients no longer look at skills as capabilities, they look at coordinated results: i.e. the outcome proves the skill, not the other way around.
2. Insight Analysts
Marketers need data literacy without the data-scientist detail or ego. Marketing teams are worried about their ability to interpret signal from noise as the quantity of data and automated dashboards multiply. In 2026, the winners will be the ones who can translate analytics into actions the business actually understands, and can act upon.
3. (Business) Storytelling
Related to the data point above, we now have easier access to more. More data, more creative formats, more media results, more points of feedback, we are drowning in ‘things to consider’. Often agencies and their clients that are brilliant at writing or making a 30s story-driven ad, can’t build the story around the ‘why’. What impact will this work have on their business? How easy it will be to make and how it will fit in with their calendar / budget / KPIs / stakeholder review cycle. People that have worked on both agency and client side are often better at this – framing the solve of a marketing problem in a way the buyer understands.
4. Tech empathy
Most of us are using Chat GPT or Copilot for our work, maybe Midjourney or Leonardo for images, and obviously production and media specialists have deep expertise in the quality and efficiency that tech can bring. But what we mean by Tech empathy is broader – an understanding of the framework of marketing technology:
- Where and how should AI be used to improve things, and where is it cutting corners to build margins.
- How are we using a DAM, why does it matter?
- Should we / how are we using a workflow tool, what impact is it having on our business and our lives?
- Are we using tech properly to measure performance, and do we know when to act on the data, and when to ignore it or interpret it for ourselves?
5. Social Influence + Emotional Intelligence
Recent changes in the workplace have put some ‘traditional’ skills on the endangered list, and they are skills that we need to protect:
- Covid and working from home impacted a generations confidence and ability to interact with people in the workplace – many simply aren’t good at interaction and communication. Scott Galloway for example has highlighted this as an issue with his sons, and how he works hard with them to normalize talking to strangers, and how important that is for their lives and careers.
- AI is also hurting some people’s ability to listen, digest and prioritize. This is a finely tuned skill learned over years, and fundamental in any role in business. Some (often younger people) are simply asking AI to record a meeting and summarise it instead of actually listening and thinking.
So the vital skill that becomes more important in the age of AI? Emotional Intelligence and the confidence and social influence that comes with it. Our industry needs people that can interpret subtle cues, human bias, office politics and build human relationships, in order to lead teams and projects forward. This is the skill that conquers all.
At Flock we help evaluate and build learning programs for our clients, and also plug gaps in capability externally while organizations may build that up themselves.
This is a famous misquote of Darwin on survival:
– ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change’
And this is the one most relevant to our outlook for 2026 – how we retain, adapt and retrain our most human skills and traits, and combine them with mastering technology, is what will win the day.
If you’re interested in how we can help you get ready for this year and beyond – fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
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