It was the strategy mash-up of the year. We brought back 7 of the winners from the APG Awards to battle it out in front of a live audience in the cinema at Channel 4.

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Each winner gave a 5-minute presentation of their thinking and then had one minute to persuade the planners in the room, and on livestream, to vote for their pitch to represent the 'tastiest' flavour of strategy.  MC David Wilding whipped the audience into a frenzy of expectation and free flowing Quality Street and Liora Ingram skipped away with the prize for advocating ‘keeping it honest and real' for Pot Noodle.

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You can watch the film of the evening, including all the speeches and some masterful mc’ing by David Wilding in a sparkly jacket. Oh, and there’s a clown and a couple of blokes in boiler suits. It is nearly Xmas after all.

WARC's John Bizzell goes behind the APG Grand Prix-winning campaign for a car that either sends you to sleep OR into raptures: the Skoda Octavia. Joe Crust, Strategy Director at Leo Burnett UK, takes us behind the scenes.

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Listen here or click below to watch the interview.

This week I went to Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry event. There were some really good speakers and a helpful update on consumer responses to efforts to make UK advertising more inclusive (topline is progress in some areas, more work needed in others). But it was in the panel discussion that my personal lightbulb went ‘ping’.

In the space of just a few decades the British have transformed from a nation of meat and two veg-ers to a nation where Chinese cuisine is our favourite takeaway treat, and air fryers are used more often than ovens.

ITV’s archive of food content and subtitle data identifies three cultural shifts that can help brands tap into the nation's foodie mindsets, behaviours and ambitions. It shows how, as a nation, we've gone from using food as a performance of social class to food for performance, formal dinners to intuitive grazing, home cooks to a nation with foodie ambition.

I hesitate to begin this write-up with a negative, but I think I could make a reasonable bet that most planners and strategists would not put measurement and effectiveness at the top of their favourite ‘Planning Things To Do’ list.

It’s easy to shunt what seem like the difficult, data heavy aspects of Planning to another day, especially if you prefer the creative thinking aspects of the job and all the mental and imaginative stimulation that these can deliver.

This was the impetus for Noisy Thinking. Precisely to try and show that the whole game of measurement can be as rich and varied and interesting as brief writing and creative development if you have the right mindset and a suite of engaging tools and ways of thinking at your disposal...

Canvas8 invite the APG community to join their online reflections on the trends and cultural moments of  2025 that had genuine impact.

Their editors have distilled them into eight awards. From brands to products to people, they aim to map out exactly how and why these zeitgeist makers became the standout stars of the year.

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They take place at 10:00 GMT and 17:00 GMT.

It was an evening full of noisy and provocative ideas, incredibly sticky and useful prescriptions for us to take away and full of hope for the future.

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You can read my write-up and watch snippets from the evening thanks to our wonderful panel of Jim Carroll, Ayo Fagbemi, Ashley Biack, Imali Hettiarachchi and Chair, Kit Altin.