
APG
- Jun 21, 2018
- 2 min
What the Ad World Can Learn from Politics?
Tuesday night the APG hosted Alastair Campbell. He did some Brexit bashing, he despaired over Trump, he confirmed our belief that we’re all f***ed. And us planners? we all nodded in perfect synchrony over our Brew Dogs and salami sticks (great addition to snack repertoire, APG). One thing he said still rings in my ears today. An observation about the way in which our political communications landscape has been fundamentally high-jacked, re-formulated and robbed of its honour.

APG
- Jun 19, 2018
- 2 min
Meditations on Alastair Campbell
APG Noisy Thinking: Strategies for Political Party Brands Remember the famous Blue Peter clip? The one with the elephant? It’s walking around the studio s***ting all over the place. You see, the elephant is Brexit. John Noakes is Jeremy Corbyn and he’s trying to pretend that the elephant isn’t s***ting on the floor, in fact he’s not talking about the elephant at all. F***ing politics is f***ed. We’re in a f***ing mess. Nobody has a f***ing clue what to do. This and more we le

APG
- Sep 8, 2017
- 3 min
How do you tell the stories that grip the nation?
We started talking to ITV earlier this year. We were interested in 3 things. The first is the Brexit bubble. The much discussed sense that we lost touch with half the country geographically, demographically and strategically. It took that vote to wake us up and make us do something about it, so today is in part a response to that. A way of getting back in touch with rest of the country and getting lots of cultural and grist for the planner’s mill The second is the of art st

APG
- Nov 30, 2016
- 5 min
What transformed your thinking in 2016?
It’s a good question, and with a year like 2016, rich pickings for the thoughtful strategist. It’s also the reason why we have chosen Transformational Thinking as our theme for the 2017 APG Creative Strategy Awards. So unable to resist a little branded theming we decided to soft launch the awards at the final Noisy Thinking of the year by asking ‘what transformed your thinking?’ of the people who lead the strategy in some of the most interesting agencies. We gave them 6 minut

APG
- Oct 21, 2016
- 6 min
A Reasonable Rant
Being a planner today is bewildering. Or at least, I am bewildered. Big picture wise, in line with client-agency relationships, the role of planning seems to have got smaller as it has become more complex. In addition, I find my lack of control extremely disconcerting. What can I do about recessions, budget cuts, new CMOs, organisational structure and culture of global organisations, the separation of ownership and control at those organisations, just to name a few? This is w

APG
- Sep 20, 2016
- 5 min
Why did we stop listening? Brand lessons from Brexit
For our first Noisy Thinking of the Autumn we stepped outside the immediate confines of our world for a theme and for our speakers. A little bit of me was concerned that we’d talked ourselves out on this one but we thought it was important to address the implications as a community and think about what part we might play in the post Brexit world – not least in shaping the strategy on our clients’ brands. So we invited speakers from politics and policy, cultural insight and p
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