This is the planning event designed to take stuff off your To Do List rather than berate you for not having enough strings to your bow. This is the one where two of the most influential and successful CSOs debate the art of doing less to achieve more, and not only keep your job but effectively get better at it.

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Jo Arden, CSO of Ogilvy and Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi and Saatchi will talk about how we all struggle in the age of scope creep, wall to wall zoom, pushy account people and hideously blurred boundaries. And how hard it can be to work out how and where to devote your time.

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Jo and Richard are going to address this in an entirely practical way with lots of brilliant advice, war stories and some personal prescriptions for being a more effective and satisfied strategist planning a more sensible and sustainable career.

The next event in our series 'Get the best out of AI' is happening online on Tuesday 17th September from 5pm-6pm BST. 

Oli Feldwick and Lucia Komljen will be helping us understanding the ways AI it might change the way we live, the way our consumers think and behave, and the mechanics of business, in a more fundamental and unexpected way.

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This series of talks and discussions is designed to go deeper into specific AI topics that have a direct relevance to the practice of Planning and Strategy. 

The great Mark Ritson recently wrote a brief but provocative post about hating the title ‘creative strategist’.

On behalf of the APG, the home of planners and strategists, this is an invitation for Mark to come and judge the APG’s Creative Strategy Awards 2025.

His post posed tough questions for anyone whose job is or includes creative strategy. It received 1000+ likes and a huge amount of agreement.

The essence of it was that the title is an oxymoron - that you can’t be both an expert strategist and an expert creative. Mark is rightly a purist when it comes to strategy. To him the title wrongly blurs the lines between two things which should be distinct.

Channel 4’s annual Diversity in Advertising award is now open and this year it’s especially relevant to planners. The idea is ‘inclusivity by design’ which means writing inclusivity into the thinking from the brief. It’s easy to think of accessibility as an add-on, at the final stages of execution. But this is a chance to shape your communication around the objective of being inclusive to more audiences. Have a read. I think this is the most fascinating and worthwhile of challenges

🙇‍♂️ I find it baffling how ready some agencies are to promote really excellent planners into senior positions and serious departmental or management responsibility, with little or no preparation. Account people at least have a management structure implicit in the way they organised. It trains them on the job how to lead people and foster team culture. But strategists get a shiny new title and just have to busk it till they work out how to do it.

🦉 So a couple of years I got together with Bridget Angear and Craig Mawdsley to work out how this gap could be filled with practical, actionable and strategy-centric teaching. We wanted to create a course on how to make it in strategy management (by-passing the 'busking it' bit).

👨‍🏫 Craig and Bridget (c+b) led strategy at AMVBBDO over many years and managed one of the most successful ever planning functions as Heads of Department and Joint CSOs. So we tried to bottle all their experience and everything they learned about how to (and how not to) do it, and created a series of Strategy Management Masterclasses.

👩‍🎓 We just ran the 4th iteration of these classes with guest tutors Andy Nairn, Raquel Chicourel, Cat Wiles, Emily Harlock, Raj Nathwani, and Will Whalley. We covered the all important topics of managing other planners, creating culture, leading on new business, leading in the agency and managing yourself.

🤔 We had a group of lovely, serious, excellent planners who over the course of 5 weeks re-thought their role at work and learned a host of new ways of being a strategy leader with management responsibility. And no busking.

👩‍🏫 It's one of the most pleasurable and enlightening parts of my APG year. And I would like to pay tribute to all the delegates for giving so much to the programme, but mostly to Craig and Bridget who donate their time to share their wisdom and experience, in a spirit of complete openness and generosity. It's a massive boost to the APG and the planning community at large, and lets us off all that busking! A great, big Thank you.

🧠 We'll be running it again in the Autumn. If you want to sign up to learn how to do it just email sarahnewman@apg.org.uk or molly@apg.org.uk and we'll put you down for it.

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Sarah Newman

APG Director

Think of a planner. What image comes to mind? Ironic notebook? Quiet demeanour? Statement glasses? You probably conjured one of these, right? 

There’s a lingering stereotype that planners are introverted intellectuals who prefer to work solo. Of course it’s a cliché for a reason. Many strategic thinkers would choose time and space to mull over a problem or an idea....

Sam Fowler, Chief Strategy Officer at Craft Media London is running our next ‘How To’ event on 'How not to be afraid of numbers'.

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Whether presented as targets, KPI's or just raw data, numbers are a fundamental and ever present constant in advertising now. ​

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This session will focus on equipping you with a toolbox of tips and tricks Sam has picked up during his time in the industry, so you can quickly focus on what matters, feel confident in handling data and begin a journey to making numbers work for you.

APG are delighted to be partnering with Fergus O’Carroll in a new, occasional series of podcasts featuring winners of the APG awards from back in the day. It’s astonishing how interesting, relevant and enlightening these cases are still today. So much to learn from them and so much to enjoy.

The latest episode focuses on how Dixons overcame its significant weaknesses by hijacking its competitors strengths. A brilliant APG Gold award winner from 2011, its irreverent tone made it feel like the brand was on the side of the consumer, not just selling to them.

AI is transforming advertising and marketing, and it’s just the beginning. So, it’s important to understand the industry’s attitudes to these developments. The APG has created a short, 13-question survey and invites you to share your insights. The findings will be shared with the community.​

Here is the annual survey, organised by Warc, looking at the future of strategy globally. Do please fill it in with your thoughts.

The APG A-Z is a series of 26 short and inspiring videos that are designed to give you all the basics for a proper understanding of the practice of planning and strategy. Whether you’re just starting out in an agency - be it in advertising, media, social, design, whatever - and have planner or strategist in your title, or you work for a client or research company and have a professional interest in strategy, this course is for you to do in your own time.

The clue is in the name. It’s the place on the APG site where we bring together all the precious bits of strategic learning that can help you navigate a tricky problem, give you fresh inspiration or just wake up your jaded planning brain when you need help but don’t know where else to go.

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To get a taster of how excellent these resources are for members, we’re giving you the chance to download one example of each for free.