The MPG sits alongside the APG and is the new home for media planners and strategists. It will run an extensive programme of activity covering training courses, debates and 'how to' guides designed to unpack the fundamentals of media planning, encourage independent, critical thinking, and provide a view on the world of comms and media that is universal, rooted in decades of experience and insight.

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

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...

On Tuesday night the APG hosted a brilliant Noisy Thinking event featuring four very smart, very human and very AI-forward strategy minds exploring the ‘New Strategy Alchemy’, answering the question ‘How can we best combine our unique human skills with AI to help make us all better, not worse?’

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!

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.