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.

APG Arrive & Thrive is an initiative to help aspiring and new strategists acquire essential strategy skills and build a network to help them in their careers. 

This hands-on strategy session will be lively and fun. You will be put into small teams, each team led by a senior strategist who will work with you to come up with an initial strategic response to a brand problem or opportunity. 

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...

Please join us for the MPG launch event hosted by VCCP on 23rd April. It 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’.

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.