Other APG Events

More real life, real people and some great stories of how to do great PR Planning. We heard from Martijn Nieuwenhuis (winner of the APG Creative Strategy Awards PR Prize) who will gave his winning pitch, a view on why this won from Rob Alexander and some real world examples of PR Planning at its best, with Teodora Coste and Will Butterworth.​

‘This Girl Can’, Barbie and Bodyform/Libresse are all APG Grand Prix winners that have had a positive impact on women’s lives as well as impacting the bottom line or changing behaviour. We asked the planners who won, what was required to have that much of an effect on culture and behaviour and what planners need to do to keep up the impetus for change.

What do eating insect protein, masochism and microdosing have in common? They are all marginal behaviours that give us clues about new future growth potential for brands. Can you make ‘dirty’ money green and is ‘alt’ growth the answer for business? The answer is yes…but you have to know what should and should not grow as you transition to a different business model.

Dr Helen Edwards and Leo Rayman talked about their new ideas for stimulating brand growth against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and climate change.

Purpose seems to have dominated brand marketing for the last few years - but does purpose have a point?

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This evening event explored the definition of purpose, its relationship with profit, and its role in effective marketing.

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​Our expert panel debated this issue and were not be afraid to be provocative! It included How Not to Plan authors and purpose experts: Les Binet and Sarah Carter, and DuBose Cole.

Does research always mean the death knell of campaigns destined for greatness, falling foul of rigid testing regimes and bored consumers? Or are we too craven to properly consult the people we need to engage, and work with research companies to create work that bridges the divide? 

As always, we try to ask the big questions so we rounded up some really clever people with a stake in the process to help us answer them: Kerry Collinge, Louise Horner and Omar El-Gammal.

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How do we become the planners of our own working lives? Following on from the APG Time To Think report, Success & Confidence Coach Dana Stevens leads a practical session on how you can carve out the time you need to make great work. Dana helps you reframe the way you think about your time, gives you tips on how to protect your boundaries and leads a discussion on the practical realities you are facing today.

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It’s that time of year when your client asks you to tell them what’s going to happen next. We’re in thrall to predictions but it’s a flawed ‘science’ and mostly way off. Why do we do it? And what can we learn about it in a post-Covid world for consumers?

Kevin Chesters & Mick Mahoney believe you can be whoever or whatever you want to be in this life - but you are being held back by a conspiracy. A combination of biology (simple human traits) and sociology (societal conventions) is stopping us all from being the person we know we could be. This book is designed to overcome our natural programming and the straight jacket of society, so we can release our inner creative potential. It’s not hard. It just takes a few small nudges.

Flamingo's panel explored a number of ways in which the world is creating movements and frameworks for positive change.

We got together with ITV to celebrate some of the most persuasive thinking outlined in the APG's 'Eat Your Greens' compendium of fact-based marketing thinking. 

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Cat Wiles, Richard Martin and Paul Phillips talked to us about their experiences and gave some useful tips and advice for dealing with Mental Health in the workplace.

The panel discussed the characteristics of transformational thinking, the themes that emerged from last year’s winners, and the techniques any brand could use to move beyond the conventions of its competition.

Successful soaps feel like a recipe for great communications, so what can brands can learn from them?

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A morning for planners and strategists who tested their skills in using raw data and trends to develop fast and interesting strategic approaches.

A session exploring different 'flavours' of strategy and the diverse ways that planners and strategists can forge a career.

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The evening was chaired by James Parsons and featured Jane Lingham and Kirsty Fuller speaking on behalf of 'love' and Laurence Green and Mark Murray on behalf of Byron Sharp's principle that brand growth is driven by penetration.

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In broadcasting, the barriers and opportunities thrown up by new technology are just as acute as in the rest of the commercial communication worlds.

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Dave Trott's approach to advertising combines everything from the tough New York “punch-on-the-nose” approach, to philosophy and lateral thinking.

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Are we guilty of collaborating with a marketing metaverse? How can you write a good brief if you’re not attending to the real lives of your target audience?

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An evening of truth telling, live with Richard Huntington, Mark Hadfield, Kate Waters and Lucy Irving.

Richard Huntington and Mark Hadfield debriefed their searingly honest research and social commentary research with guidance as to what it means for creative planners in the UK now.

The APG has collaborated with dyslexic reading platform, LEO to make some of the winning case studies from the APG Creative Strategy Awards much more accessible. To celebrate this we held a fascinating event to explore what dyslexic thinking is. We asked what planners could learn from the unique super power that is dyslexic thinking and how they can productively bring some of it into their work.

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Blaming the research, deriding the real people behind the glass, 'protecting' the integrity and glory of the 'idea'. We've all done it, and we're still doing it. But why?

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​Whatever your view, Raquel Chicourel, Steven Lacey, Pauline McGowan and Theo Francis came to educate, elucidate and explain how we can do the whole thing so much better, and use people and research to nurture and celebrate ideas.

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Planners sometimes move into client roles. Some stay, and others go back to agency strategy roles. So we’re going to talk to them about what they have learned from experiences on the other side of the fence, about client needs and expectations and how planners, clients and creatives can. What insights can they bring us about developing strategy and creative, and what can we learn about working more constructively with clients?

In a short survey before Xmas we asked you, planners and strategists, about your pandemic/hybrid working patterns, and we used what you told us to pinpoint the problems facing the planning community and we used the data to come up with some genuinely useful and actionable ideas for making things better. We’ve called it ‘Time to Think’.

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Learn invaluable lessons that Kev has distilled from interviews with the people who tell stories for a living in very different media:  A vicar, a sculptress, authors, journalists and a quilter.

Huge changes to the way we work and think during the last year have up-ended some of our assumptions about understanding people and inspiring creativity. Lucy Banister and Alaina Crystal share new ideas and habits for the rest of the year and beyond.

Kevin Chesters, CSO at Ogilvy has crunched TED2019 and come up with a blinder of presentation with highlights and themes from this year’s brain box festival.

People often ask where a career in planning can take them, so we thought we would try and answer that question, by getting together a huddle of brilliant agency planners who have spread their wings into new areas.

Strategic insight agency Flamingo launched its latest piece of proprietary research: on Generation Z and their expanding notions of authority.

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Speakers: Andy Davidson, Laura Roberts, Desirée Lopez and Guido Orgs

Kevin Chesters, CSO at Ogilvy has crunched TED2017 and come up with a blinder of presentation with highlights and themes from this year’s brain box festival.

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We teamed up with The Guardian to do an iconoclastic review of Cannes 2016, probing the winners and the ones that maybe should have won...

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A session exploring different 'flavours' of strategy and the diverse ways that planners and strategists can forge a career.

Familiarise yourself with the latest suite of tools that provide access to the vast amounts of data held by Google.

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Science and consumer thinking evolve. New models emerge explaining how and why consumers do what they do, and new techniques arise to understand them.

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John Grant discussed how by harnessing new technology and social media consumers can take an active part in shaping brands, culture and society

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The Nursery have conducted a year-long study delving into the lives of those entering adulthood in 2023 after a period of tumultuous educational and social change. Pauline McGowan, Charlotte Willcocks, Hannah Whitney and Sophie Marder unpacked the research and discussed how to better understand this age group through the lens of a strategist.

If you’re in PR strategy you know it’s a healthy and fast growing part of planning and strategy. If you’re any other flavour of strategist you‘ll be curious to know why. So we’ve pulled together all the leading PR agencies and their top planners to agree what it is they do and show why it’s such an exciting role.

In this characteristically high octane talk Richard Huntington, CSO at Saatchi & Saatchi, shared some of the techniques he uses to get to more powerful strategic ideas. Techniques aimed to make your thinking looser, more fluid, more interesting and more instinctive.

This event was designed to give you inspiration for your briefs, help you tap into target audiences and navigate tone and context.

It’s based in part on ITV’s huge piece of ethnographic, semiotic, qual and quant research conducted earlier this year to understand the mood across the country.

ITV's Kate Waters and Lucy Crotty walked us through the key findings of the research and then were joined by an amazing panel consisting of Chaka Sobhani, Lily Wilson, Tom Sussman and Jon Evans to discuss the implications.

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The BetterBriefs project lays bare some uncomfortable truths about the state of the industry when it comes to briefs, which may be all too familiar.

Vaughan Flood from Flood+Partners and BetterBriefs founders Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies share the findings of the largest and first global quant study into the topic of briefs.

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Jon is the author of an entertaining and enlightening book 'Asking for Trouble', and a brilliant researcher who runs Kindling.

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Here he talks about how to guide challenging and difficult work through research, from the other side of the mirror, and teaches 3 very useful techniques to help you do so.

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Axiomatic for Planners, as we are asked to do more and more in less and less time. You can’t create or stop time, but this will help you change your relationship with it.

Kevin Chesters, Strategy Partner at Harbour London put together a unique, personalised and exclusive presentation of the Very Best of TED 2009-2019.

Matt Tanter in conversation with David Pemsel, CEO of The Guardian Media Group.

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We asked Phoebe Smith & Prof Hugh Selsick to talk about the reasons why sleeplessness can become a problem, how it relates to your overall mental health, and give practical tips for getting a better sleep regime.

Kevin Chesters, CSO at Ogilvy has crunched TED2018 and come up with a blinder of presentation with highlights and themes from this year’s brain box festival.

If you could take a 30 second test that told you what medical conditions you will face in later life, would you?

A retrospective take on Cannes Lions and a panel of speakers and experts review those that won and those that just missed out at the world's greatest festival of creativity.

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This event featured a panel of experts and practitioners with extensive experience in the field who debated the power of culture for social good.

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A discussion on what behavioural science and neuroscience have revealed about how people’s choices and behaviour are driven by non-conscious instincts.

A look into the impact of system 1 and system 2 thinking on how we choose and buy brands.

Professor Gemma Calvert talked about the theory and application of neuroscience, particularly in the area of brands and marketing.

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