Having judged 27 compelling cases back in September, I’m more than ever convinced that these times of transformational change need your imagination, your insight and your lateral thought. However hard it is in the industry right now, however much it’s suggested that the agenda has moved on, please stay true to your creative soul. And stay strong … Strong as an ox. Strong as the wind. Strong as death. Strong as Katherine Hepbur...

As I am eminently unqualified to advise you how to win Gold, I will instead recount the advice from this week’s ‘How To Win 2’ event featuring a panel of 2017 judges: the quiet and reserved Kevin Chesters, the brilliant Bogdana Butnar and the jargon-hating John Harrison, moderated by APG Chair Matt Tanter.

The APG announces new Long-Term Thinking Award: A new category, for the 2019 APG Creative Strategy Awards.

We set up YouTube Works 3 years ago as a YouTube specific effectiveness competition. It was in part a response to wildly inconsistent standards across the online video market. We wanted to show that YouTube - not the cheapest place to run a video ad online, but with considerably better standards for viewability and audability - was worth paying for. What better way to do so than by showing real cases of Youtube working for adv...

Beats by Dre won a gold in the APG awards with what, I think, is a great piece of advertising thinking. The brand and the agency (R/GA) may be super hip, yet the thinking is classical.

Top news. The 2017 APG awards book is out. Reading it is one of the best “strategy workouts” that a planner can do. So, that’s what i am going to do – and i am going to use it illuminate what we mean by that much used word – “Insight”- and how it helps unlock great work.

APG collaborated with the Guardian on a review of the festival for the benefit of all those who didn’t make it as far as the croisette. Cannes is often an interesting barometer of opinion, politics and the culture of our industry so we asked 4 brilliant people to tell us what they thought of the work – choosing the campaigns and ideas that most stood out for them. They were 2 creative directors, a digital director, and a hea...

The quality of the story is the thing that will make the difference between whether your paper is in contention, or falls at the first hurdle, so it’s worth worrying about. Show what you’ve written to an honest friend outside the industry and ask them if they enjoyed reading it. If they didn’t, then chances are it’s not a good story. If they did, then maybe you’re in with a chance. Because the best of these papers will be...

For a few years I was lucky enough to lead strategy for what was once called the COI. The task was deceptively simple – recruit more teachers, with a focus on hard-to-fill subjects such as chemistry and maths.

As transformation stories go, I think this is a great one because it is a story about how a process and the culture of collaboration that it created, gave birth to an entire agency and produced some great creative work to boot.