If everyone has the same model, how do we use them to find an edge? This talk will look at the emerging new thinking in how agents, harnesses and tools on top of models are emerging and changing the way we think about work, value and impact​​.

We’re coming together for the second MPG Noisy Thinking and tackling this provocative and highly current issue, live.

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The safe plan gets signed off in twenty minutes. The brave one gets three rounds of questions, creates a delegation of challenging stakeholders and fixes the benchmark database. We tell planners to be bold and then get them to operate inside a system – of guarantees, of industry norms, of post-campaign analyses that punish variance more than they reward upside – that quietly makes personal boldness a risk.

What would have to change for courage to be truly career-enhancing?

“This was the best noisy thinking session I have been to. I think provoking more of a debate between disciplines and from people who are at the very sharp tip of it was very valuable.”

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“I thought it was excellent. As a media person, it was the perfect event for me. Provocative, spicy, friendly and useful.”

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“I really loved the conversation of media vs. creative. Really great points. Thanks as always for hosting and getting such cool people together in a room.”

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“This was my first experience of a Noisy Thinking event and I was really impressed; both by the set up of the event and the quality of the speakers.”

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.

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?’

Put two rats in a cage for about 5 minutes. They’ve never met each other before. Or spent time in that cage. ​

Astonishingly, experiments have shown that the rats will exhibit 50 different ways of behaving in that short time; playing, exploring, testing their environment and so on.​

But put a cat’s hair in the cage with them, and you kill all that stone dead. Their fear system is activated and it kills their ability to be ‘imaginative’ and engage.

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Bruce Daisley was our speaker at APG Noisy Thinking. This was the first of many fascinating insights and anecdotes that explained for me, so electrically, how we can be so much more creative by leaning into our humanity.

Tuesday’s Noisy Thinking debate started with a provocative but pretty straight question: 

'Media or creative? Who holds the key to killer comms planning?’

It was the first APG/MPG joint event and it was essentially about collaboration: How to develop a common and workable understanding of what good comms planning is, how we can work better together and what ideas and practices would foster that collaboration and bring about better outcomes for our brands and clients.

Wind back to last December. 

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I was worried. The mood I sensed from the planning community was one of declining influence. 

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That all sorts of forces are conspiring to make the job harder and more complicated.

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And narrower. 

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It felt like we were being pushed further down the strategy food chain to coalesce, at worst, around just making and tweaking.

Not influencing at the level of our clients’ business.

We’re a thoughtful bunch and it’s easy sometimes to over-think. 

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

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.