How can we combine the unique power of human strategists and AI to make us better, not worse?

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Nick Hirst, Saskia Jones, Oli Feldwick, Clare Phayer and Shaun Barton will tackle this question head-on to give us farseeing and practical suggestions for how we, in combination with the potent AI tools at our disposal, can be brilliant.

On Tuesday, over 40 new and aspiring strategists braved the tube strikes and battled it out at APG Arrive and Thrive's first Strategy Lab event at AMV BBDO. 

We set a real client brief for Comfort and gave them an hour to crack it. In teams supported by a strategy mentor, they had to find some compelling insights, develop a one page brief and then pitch it in 2 minutes to the actual client Jennifer Fawdrey, CCO Mark Elwood, CSO Jo Arden and myself. So no pressure!

Great Big News from the APG today as we welcome the media planning and strategy communities into the heart of the APG. MPG will offer high quality training and events and strengthen our community with new thinking, and the belief that media doesn’t need any more complexity or automation, it needs more intelligence, more transparency, more education, and more inspiration.

I was mildly concerned that a title like that for an evening of talks right at the start of the rainiest January/February on record was asking for trouble.  The weather may just be a good metaphor for the British mood, but there’s been a whole other THING going on in the world and finding reasons to be cheerful could come across as glib.

So I rounded up some of the most interesting speakers in our community and asked them to give us some good reasons to be cheerful...

The MPG launch event, hosted by VCCP, will take the form of one of our Noisy Thinking events with a number of speakers, including David Wilding, Sally Weavers and James Shoreland debating different views on the provocation ’The Black Box is the Future of Media Planning’.

The role has been "underfunded, rushed and reduced to frameworks rather than applying quality, human thinking", according to Pippa Glucklich.

This is a brand new course about modern creative strategy and how to increase the influence of strategy in modern agencies. It’s for senior strategists (Strategy Director and above). It aims to show them how to increase their sphere of influence for their brands, their agencies and themselves.

The APG is a not-for-profit organisation run for and by its members: primarily account planners in advertising agencies, but increasingly the wider community of communications strategists, including media planners, channel planners and digital planners.