APG Noisy Thinking 2012

Our flagship evening event held 6 times a year in association with Flamingo. Each event addresses a provocative question or current theme focused on Planning & Strategy. These events are supported by Google.

Where is planning going? This was the question that the APG posed on Tuesday 6th March to three planning luminaries- Adam Morgan, Richard Huntington and Cameron Saunders. Hailing from the worlds of consultancy, business and the heart of a creative agency respectively, their perspectives on what planning is doing right, what it’s doing wrong, and where it’s headed were eagerly received by a packed audience at the Wellcome Collection.

Last night at Fallon, the APG convened for some more Noisy Thinking about the present and future of planning.

This time it was the turn of clients past, present and future to chare their views on the state of the discipline and the challenges facing Planners….

Andy Fennell | Group Marketing Director of Diageo

Mark Lund | Partner at NOW and former CEO of COI

Alison Hardy | Owner of Headstrong Thinking and former Director of Marketing Services at Doctor Foster

Business Bites Back

10 May 2012 | Craig Mawdsley

5 Client Tips

16 May 2012| Lee Fordham

‘Planning on the World Stage’ was the topic of APG’s third, in the series of six, Noisy Thinking events, hosted by Google and sponsored by Flamingo. Guy Murphy (Global Planning Director JWT); John Shaw (Partner, Rapier and former Global Planning Director at Ogilvy); and Jackie Hughes (Group Strategy Director, Flamingo) were the keynote speakers of the evening, reflecting on their experiences of global and local planning.

The fourth in the Noisy Thinking series for the APG took the beginning of the APG's Autumn programme by storm. This event had sold out shortly after it was announced and every chair was taken – justifiably, as it turned out.

Andy Nairn, CSO of Dare, Sue Unernam, CSO of Mediacom and Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy took the podium. Deliberately chosen as speakers not just for their intellectual passion and leading thinking, but also for the fact that they represented different kinds of agency and would, we predicted, illuminate some interesting skirmishes in the turf war over data between agencies serving clients.

How often have you sat and worried about whether you're doing the right thing, in the right way, for the right business? About whether Planners are really useful, and if so, to whom? About what's on the agenda for Planning and what should be on the agenda for Planning?

Tracey Follows | CSO of JWT

David Hackworthy | Strategy Partner at The Red Brick Road

Alex Dunsdon | M&C Saatchi's Development Director

Tracey will set the scene for 3.0 and ask whether we are semantically all at sea with the idea....and whether machines will be dictating to us, teaching us, informing us....and communicating brand to us. Or is there a way in which planners can regain authority in a brand world increasingly bought to us by the IT Crowd?

David thinks that you should "free your mind and your ass will follow"(*). He thinks planning is over-prescribed and over-thought, and this gets in the way of making the best contribution we can to creating better work. He also has some trenchant things to say about how we organise ourselves and get paid.

Alex thinks Planning is obsessed with revelation when clients want transformation, that it's more profitable for us to have meetings than do stuff, that Planners should behave like Marketing Directors - and that it's time for a rebellion. 

It was the most open of open briefs. ‘You’ve got 10 minutes to tell us what inspires you.’ I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that our five luminous speakers met the brief brilliantly. But not to over-run? That was extraordinary.

If you weren’t at our Noisy Thinking on Monday, you missed the Planning Treat of the Year. Fifty minutes of high octane intellectual and cultural stimulation delivered with energy and aplomb.

Craig Mawdsley | APG Chair and Joint CSO of AMVBBDO plundered the pop culture of the ‘60s and the extraordinary creative phenomenon that was the Beatles to arrive at five infinitely human and fundamental rules of combat for Planners….

Richard Huntington | CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi took his inspiration from three personal heroes - George Orwell, Julian Cope and James Dyson - and urged Planners to set themselves against orthodoxy of any kind: Be a forward-thinking motherfucker…

Rachel Hatton | Group Planning Director of Ogilvy urged us to get to our feet and just go. With a radical re-investigation of the extraordinarily powerful impact of walking on just about any aspect of the Planner’s life, job and psyche she made a modest but compelling proposal #Planningramble….

Russell Davies | managed to bamboozle the audience by effectively giving three presentations at once: A complete list of everything that inspires him, a continuously changing bunch of quotes on the nature of inspiration, and a quixotic rumination on inspiration and his own life, taking in Robert Gaskin, Tim Page and Dorothy L Sayers along the way…

Malcolm White | Founder of KROW, delivered a magnificent polemic in favour of paleophilia (taking some mildly risqué liberties with language along the way); and abutting our obsession with all that is new and shiny and novel against the riches that are to be found and the inspiration to gained from the books, poems and paintings of the past….