How to Unearth Strategy Magic with a Big Dose of Real Life

This is an account of the main findings of a study in which expert ethnographer Mark Hadfield collaborated with the APG by interviewing some of the winners from the 2025 APG Creative Strategy Awards about the ingredients of their success; specifically, how bringing in real life observation and the feelings and attitudes of real people lit the spark that made their thinking truly stand out.

The findings, plus a brilliantly helpful and useful coda by Jo Arden, CSO of AMV BBDO and Co-Chair of the APG, set up one of our series of 'How To' talks. These are a regular feature of the APG calendar, where we take subjects of special interest to planners and ask an expert to give us their view and some practical and helpful guidelines for improving the way we work.

The talks are live, online, and ticketed. But occasionally we make the content available to a wider audience - this time as an Easter treat!

So here is an account of Mark’s research and some slides from Jo that point us in the right direction for bringing real people and their unique real-world feelings back into the craft of planning and strategy.

Sarah Newman | APG Director

How to unearth strategy magic

By: Mark Hadfield, Meet The 85%

Over the past few months we had the privilege to chat with a group of APG award-winning planners on a project partnering with the excellent Account Planning Group.

We chatted to nine authors of award winning papers from the 2025 APG Awards, with a loose conversation guide, but with a centre of gravity around: What mix of research actually powered the work?

Across the conversations, spanning everything from Müller Rice to Dulux to McDonald’s, one thing came through consistently:

AI and Big Data are now table stakes.

But they’re not where the magic comes from.

AI is powerful. But it’s a mirror.

No one we spoke to dismissed AI. Quite the opposite. It’s fast. Useful. Increasingly embedded in the day-to-day reality of planning.

But it has limitations (at the moment) and reflects what already exists. It spots patterns. It summarises. It optimises, and that can be a limitation for a hungry irrational planner’s mind:

As Yolanda from BBDO put it, talking about her Libresse paper:

Sometimes the best work doesn’t come from pattern recognition, it comes from breaking patterns and logic.

Data tells you what. People tell you why.

Big Data brings reassurance. It gives scale and confidence to an increasingly risk-averse industry and client base. A sense that “60 million people can’t be wrong” (to paraphrase and quote Neil Godber).

But again, it has its flaws.

Across the conversations, there was a shared view that data can point you to the problem but that it rarely unlocks the answer.

There’s a sense that the ‘unlock’ only happens when you get closer to people.

Stuart, talking about his V&A paper said:

When you understand not just what people do (which the data might tell us), but why they do it, and how it feels to them, is when you can elevate your work.

You can’t feel data.

Good enough is easy. Magic isn’t.

There was a clear tension running through all the work - the fact that AI and data can get you to a “good enough” answer quickly. And in an industry under pressure to deliver faster, that’s tempting.

With so many planners under ever-increasing pressure and in what I call ‘output mode’ - relying on quicker tools that are ‘good enough’ is becoming ever more important.

But “good enough” doesn’t win APG awards, and probably won’t win you the pitch.

The standout strategies - the ones that land emotionally, culturally and commercially often come from places that feel illogical, unexpected or “dumb” (to quote Matt from VCCP) - and we found that those strategies weren’t powered by AI and Big Data alone - but by a combination of AI, Big Data AND human-led research.

Matt from VCCP said of his Müller strategy:

The difference is texture

Again and again, planners talked about moments they picked up human texture. Not dashboards. Not charts. Moments.

Standing in someone’s living room, noticing what’s on the shelves. Hearing how something is said, not just what is said.Spending time where customers hang out.

The small, human details that don’t show up in data. The texture of reality.

And it’s in that texture that the work improves and takes leaps it wouldn’t have taken otherwise.

Craig talked about not what was said, but how it was said for his Poppy’s strategy:

The power of n=1

One of the more uncomfortable truths that we found was that a lot of breakthrough thinking in the papers didn’t come from large datasets.

They came from a single moment - often from a single person. A sentence. A reaction. A pause.

Something that made the authors stop and think: There’s something in that.

But acting on that requires confidence, because in an industry that embraces ‘the data told me so’ as a security blanket, “n=1” doesn’t look convincing in a deck.

Tass - author of the McDonald’s award-winning paper - expressed this when he said:

So the role of the planner, and the wider agency team, becomes critical to not just find the insight, but to back it and sell it.

How to work with human-led research: Reality first, Brand second.

A consistent theme from the winning papers was how they worked with human-led research: The best work didn’t start with trying to validate an answer toward the end of a strategic process, it started with people early in the process.

Not with a tightly defined brief designed to prove a hypothesis, but with open exploration about customers of a brand, prospects of a brand, or just… people.

A lot of the planners did this at the beginning of the process, and chatted with real humans without knowing what they were really looking for.

They trusted that something more interesting would emerge. And it did.

Stuart said of his V&A strategy:

If you do it the other way and “commission a finding”, you’ll probably get one, but you might miss a stronger truth.

How to work with human-led research: ‘Shed the snobbery’ and get out!

This sounds obvious, but it’s not happening enough. I’m not convinced it ever has happened enough, but it feels like it’s happening a lot less than the past.

And in the current climate there’s lots of discussion about working from home versus working in the office… yet there’s very little thought about working where your customers or clients are! Spending time with them, observing them, chatting with them. Soaking up their behaviours, language, culture, nuance.

Every author we chatted to - across different levels, and in different sized agencies - talked about the need to get out of the office, to spend time in people’s homes, to walk around shops and to sit with clients inside their businesses.

To see and feel the world as it actually is, not as it appears through a screen.

Frances said of her clients, Very:

And in this, there’s a laziness - and an arrogance - that planners, agencies and brands are building strategies and creative platforms without ever involving real people. We’re investing millions of pounds to try and change human behaviour, to get humans to buy a product, yet we’re becoming arrogant enough to think we can do it without chatting to real humans.

We expect them to ‘love’ our brands, and yet we can’t be bothered to even speak to them.

Shame on us.

The risk: becoming the turkey

I want to be clear that the findings aren’t an anti-AI argument.

AI is here. It’s useful - an essential tool in modern planning and it’s only going to get better.

But there’s a warning emerging from all of this.

If planning leans too heavily on AI and Big Data for “good enough” answers we are effectively training the system to replace us.

Every shortcut teaches the machine what we do.

And if what we produce is incremental, pattern-based, predictable work…

It becomes replicable by an “AI slot machine” run by Meta, Google or others, and negates the need for creative agencies or planners…

Max from VCCP said:

So what should planning do?

Jo Arden closed the APG session with an important set of reflections.

If planning wants to thrive, not just survive it needs to:

• Protect time for getting close to real people

• Make sure investment is seen as valuable

• Be entrepreneurial in how it can access its audiences

• Appreciate that strategy magic can come from small numbers of people

• Provide a blanket of security and confidence for those leading human-led research

Because one of the enduring roles of planning hasn’t changed: To represent the voice of real people.

Jo Arden's final slide

The Reality Advantage^™

What this project reinforced is something we’ve been exploring for a while - The Reality Advantage™

The best strategies don’t come from choosing between AI, data, or human understanding - they come from combining them.

But with one important shift: Reality first. Brand second.

Because AI can mirror the world.Data can measure the world.

But only real people can show you how it actually feels and that’s still where the magic is.