APG Noisy Thinking: Reasons to be Cheerful

I was mildly concerned that a title like that for an evening of talks right at the start of the rainiest January/February on record was asking for trouble.  The weather may just be a good metaphor for the British mood, but there’s been a whole other THING going on in the world and finding reasons to be cheerful could come across as glib.

So I rounded up some of the most interesting speakers in our community and asked them to give us some good reasons to be cheerful. They had only 5 minutes each. And I figured that if they spoke for 25 minutes in all and if no one was convinced, we could all go home and have an early night; a profound reason to be cheerful in my book.

It didn’t play out like that. The first thing that happened was all the tickets went; fast. We had a waitlist that grew and grew. We felt awful about not being able to let everyone in.

Then we met in VML’s swanky new suite in Sea Containers. It has river views to die for and a really funky vibe (which is a massive reason to be cheerful if you work for VML. And probably a cause of some resentment for half the audience used to less swanky surroundings).

The room was packed. We asked the speakers to avoid slides if they could. 

Speaking without slides increases concentration (in my view) especially in the evening.

VML’s Kate Nettleton set the scene with charm and positivity. 

Then Martin Beverley kicked us off with his 5 minutes.  It was a brilliantly entertaining slide presentation.

(What do I know?)

And he came up with more reasons to be cheerful than all the others put together: 26.5 in all.

His reasons were all based on hard data and spanned dating (it’s coming off-line), the economy (it’s picking up), optimism (optimists live longer), the fact that looking at long term data shows life has never been better; and hedgehogs.

Scroll through the full deck to get the gen on hedgehogs and steal all his points for your next trends presentation. They are genius. And he set the tone for the evening.

Then Sammy King came on. He’s a former strategist turned TikToker. He hadn’t submitted anything in advance, didn’t have any slides and clearly didn’t have any notes.  

Well, Sammy had written a poem in rhyming couplets, in homage to Ian Dury and the Blockheads 1981 hit ‘Reasons to be Cheerful Part3’ (look it up if you’re under 30)

He’d learned it off by heart and proceeded to declaim with a flourish.

It starts like this ...

'Forget the blockbuster, the Oscar-winning spot. Forget about putting all your chips in one pot. 

It’s Tom Roach and Dr. Grace Kite on how we win battles without a huge fight. 

It’s not just the 60, glossy and tall. It’s the lots of littles, the fragments, the small.

A TikTok on a Tuesday, a comment that sticks, a six-second bumper that gives you a fix.'

You can listen to the full poem here

And if that in itself isn’t a reason to be cheerful, I don’t know what is.

He also managed to make some serious points about the possibilities that have opened up for building brands through influencers and referenced excellent thinking by Grace Kite and Tom Roach, demonstrating that brands can be built successfully through fragments of consistent, smaller interactions and touch points.

He noted the IPA work on the positive impact creators can have on long term brand building and research that TikTok have done with System1 which proves entertaining, narrative-led content is much more effective than cut downs.

I don’t think any of us would argue against entertaining and narrative-led content.

Least of all the performance poets.

Next up was Lilli English, who has her finger on the pulse of the nation through Leo Burnett’s continuous research survey. She chose to make some counter-cultural and compelling points about how we are getting GenZ so wrong. They’re not a doom scrolling, myopic, childish cohort but the glue that holds families and communities together and influences their families in deeply practical ways.

I was fascinated by this, not least because I have a GenZ at home who is effectively my fashion adviser. She also reads and interprets all the instructions on boring household things that I’m far too busy and important to attend to, makes the best pizza known to man and interprets youth culture for me with a quirky precision.

It was infinitely cheering to hear that this cohort is the first to channel life wisdom out and across generations to parents, to siblings, aunts, grandparents, and that they are the biggest net influencers of any generation, acting as guides to navigate a bewildering and unstable world. And from a business point of view they are today’s engine of influence across all audiences (over 75% of adults over 28 have sought advice from a GenZ) so they are impacting the bottom line. And we can start building ideas that travel further than we ever expected.

The youth of today, eh?

Pete Buckley is a serious data man. He works for Meta and has a media background. He claims that up to 3 months ago his job was 23 years of writing slides. But he’s stopped writing them now, which is lucky given the Noisy Thinking slide ban, even if Bevo decided to go rogue.

Why? The revolution in his life is Claude code which he is using to build tools that can find insights in the millions of key words and billions of ads that previously needed a programme engineer to facilitate. Pete and the planner team at Meta can do this themselves without coding or programming experience. Pete believes this is a super power any planner or strategist can learn to use with an AI agent and it has the potential to be a game-changing development. The only blocker is our imagination.

We just need to know what to ask and be curious about the answers.

The second cheering thought is that planners and strats will only become more important.  In this new world where anyone can create anything or analyse anything, it’s going to be all about having a hypothesis, a strategy. It’s the inputs and prompts that matter because insight still starts with judgement, with knowing what to ask and what to ignore. That’s our skill. Because in a world where answers are cheap, insight starts with judgement. And isn’t that the definition of a wise human being?

Jo Arden spoke last.  She didn’t have any slides. And she didn’t have a piece of paper either. Or at least she did have a piece of paper but owing to printer failure, only the first 6 lines had come out. But she had written a speech.

It was therefore extraordinary then that she managed to give the whole 5-minutes without reference to notes and WITHOUT HAVING LEARNED IT.  Eat your heart out, Sammy.

Luckily, I have a digital copy and it’s so compellingly written that I’m going to quote a lot of it here. And she is the co-Chair of the APG, so I’m staying on her good side.

Jo began with BB King, the King of the Blues, who knew a thing or two about life and brought all of his life into his music. We heard about him fathering 15 children and how he inspired other artists and sang for President Obama. The blues he sang were of love, betrayal, bigotry, defiance, working conditions, injustice, friendship and family.

He said “The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.”

And this is Jo’s wellspring of endless reasons to be cheerful; we have something in common with BB King in how we gather knowledge, in our minds and in our hearts and use it in our work.

‘There’s no denying it is an intense time. A time of new starts with new agencies and a time of endings, of agency brands, of the old ways of doing things, and for some, unfortunately, the end of jobs you have loved. So, when I say “cheerful”, I don’t mean “everything’s fine”. I mean: there are still reasons to stand tall.

But here’s the thing about strategy, every day that passes, whatever it brings makes you better at your job. 

In a research group before Christmas as part of the Home Truths research we do at AMV, I spoke to a woman who had moved here with her husband from Pakistan two years ago. She told me about her friendship with her ‘flag neighbour’, a man with the Union Jack covering the front of his house who volunteered in the local food bank. I learned a lot about perspective and the danger of making assumptions that day. 

Every book we read, news we hear, social rabbit hole we go down or exchange we observe makes us better at our jobs. 

Bad days build knowledge: the creative review which makes you questions your sanity; the awky meeting where the clients clearly don’t get on; the feedback that felt unfair; the restructures, the leavers, the rumour mill. They build knowledge about relationships, compromise, grit and grace. 

And the good days build knowledge too – how to get to great, what winning feels like, the irresistible alchemy of a team that can crack it together, the belief in your ability to see problems, to simplify and solve.

Like writers gathering material, or actors method-prepping, or BB King singing the blues, anything we do is compounding our craft. 

At a time where perhaps people feel like things are being taken away, take cheerfulness from BB King’s energy for acquiring knowledge and the irrefutable fact, that once you have it, it’s yours forever’. 

So that was the meat of it. It was inspiring, funny, deeply impressive, warm, clever: all the great things that make great planners.

But a great event, like a successful play, depends on the audience. And this audience asked such brilliant questions that my own reason to be most cheerful is the people in the room: How they took the theme, picked it apart, identified the tensions, introduced some head scratching ideas for the speakers to chew over and significantly increased the learning in the room as a result.

So here are the highlights from the Q&A:

The big one:

Will strategy be automated?

Clearly a reason to be miserable.  But cheeringly, the answer was ‘no’

Jo talked about the ‘kinetic transference of emotion’ and the 2% of quirky insight that an AI can never give. This is the magic that fuels creative strategy.

Kate noted the negativity bias in human brains and the need for optimism as it’s infectious. Martin reminded us that anything you look at, however apparently dire, can be flipped to an opportunity.  

Sammy leaned into the importance of escapism and how the surreal and the funny bring light to life that can be a struggle.

This led unprompted to a discussion about how the best work is done and made when teams are bonded and having fun together: ‘Fun is a serious business and fundamental’ It’s the opposite of cultures that are anxious and clenched.

And in any case, despite the rise of AI the job remains the same (as Pete pointed out earlier) – the expert curation of knowledge and the ability to make good judgements and know what to sacrifice. And emphasised that the models don’t have knowledge, they look for patterns and it’s the quality of the person analysing those data that makes the difference.

Lilli doubled down on the importance of simplification and critical thinking. When information is potentially overwhelming you have to continuously stress test the ideas you encounter and create against peoples’ experience.  Follow your instinct.

We will be coming bck to this a topic later in the Noisy year.

Next up…in the light of all the above

What should we stop doing?

Jo expanded her theme and emphasised that although knowledge is intrinsic to the job, you can’t know everything. Don’t worry about it. You work with other people who do know, so use that and sprinkle your own knowledge into other people’s lives.

Sammy built on this to remind us that we shouldn’t hang out with people like us. Diverse opinions and experiences and niche, different thinking is essential fuel.

Pete reminded us to stop doing the things that can be automated and identify the things that really need your thinking.

‘Stop the swirl’, said Martin. (The man who bedazzled us with 26 plus slides in a few nanoseconds). Stop the swirl of people, politics and complication. We’re at our best when we are incisive and cut through it all to simple answers.

And don’t try to be the cleverest person in the room. It creates paralysis and stops people getting to good answers. Too right, Kate.

And the final killer question!

Is cheer enough to make change?

There was a gasp of recognition in the room as this gauntlet was thrown by Keith Muir.

It’s up to us how we respond to life.

Change comes from people being positive.

Chase aliveness every day, and it adds up.

Block out stuff you can’t control.

Find joy in small moments.

People are motivated by optimism, by hope; the possibility of change and the potential to build back better.  Above all, be resilient and play the hand you’ve been dealt

We came for cheer and we got it. 

Not only that, we got some seriously good reasons from some seriously good, serious people who were funny, smart, entertaining and optimistic.

That’s strategists for you. And Hip, hip, hooray to us.

Sarah Newman

APG Director

6.02.2026