APG

✍ Writing. Get it right. Crafting. Insight. Tone. Virtuous circles. It's all here! 🥇 The Economist campaign is the first of an occasional series we are doing with Fergus O'Carroll where he interviews the authors of the great APG cases of former years (and asks some excellent questions). 🗞 Author Laura Marks CBE has had a brilliant post-planning career outside the industry but her recall of the conversations with creatives and clients about this most memorable and long-lived of campaigns is precise and fascinating. 👬 She articulates how the strategy and work evolved including her role as planner, doing the groups on creative development, and having to go up to the creative floor FULL OF MEN and ONLY MEN to get them to re-think the tone and role of the executions. She was credited by the then client Helen Alexander, with helping them understand that the success of the campaign was in how it made people feel. And that it needed to focus on what it does for you - not on what it is. Such a neat summation of the role of comms. 💷 She also ventures boldly into the follies of cutting advertising spend in a recession 'why would you cut your relationship with your consumer at the time you need it most?' 👀 All in all it's a heady mix of great strategy advice for now and a fascinating look at how things used to be in the world of planning. Find it on our home page

Fact vs Fiction. I'm slightly nervous of the Insight Police and their pre-eminence in creative briefing. Isn't it all a bit more complicated than that? The poet Louis McNiece says it best: 'World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural'. He is inspired by the 'drunkenness of things being various'. We'll be talking provocatively (and soberly) about messy variety, the power of fiction and questionable role of insights on Tuesday 29th 6.30pm @McCann with Mel Arrow Nick Hirst Ran Stallard Matthew Waksman

🍊 ‘The future’s bright. The future’s Orange’ is one of my all-time favourite lines. Used to launch the Orange mobile service in the late 90’s it’s hard to conceive now that an advertising end-line could have such a grip on the collective consciousness. But this campaign did. And the line is still so powerful in my imagination that when I was writing the questionnaire for the APG’s AI survey earlier this year, it inspired a final, visually-based question about how people are feeling about the future with AI. 👩💻 I miss that unalloyed optimism about technology but I am optimistic about planners and strategists and how we are engaging with it. The AI groups we set up earlier in the year under the auspices of Tom Roach and the APG are working hard and collaboratively to construct guidance and ideas on getting the best out AI for the whole community. We’ll be debriefing all the different aspects early in the autumn. 🆘 But before then, we need your help, please. How is the role of the strategist going to evolve and change with AI? How do we deal with bias and quality control? Jessica Lovell Christina Lemieux Kerensa Ayivor Ruairi Curran Tom Morton Anna Bulman Franky Farmer Josh Taylor Dadds Rory Natkiel Maximilian Weigl Ben Thomas need your opinion. It’s a short(ish) and fun questionnaire, adding to and updating the one from earlier this year. It won’t take more than 6 minutes. I’ve timed it.   If you were working for a magic circle law firm in London you could bill that time to a client for zillions of pounds. 🎁 If you’re a planner in an agency, you can gift the time to the community and the APG.

📓 When I started out as a trainee planner I was so bored that I kept a novel in my top drawer. I needed something to do when no-one was giving me any work. Then I got found out by the Head of Account Management and I fessed up as to why. Things got a bit better after that. 💡 I was the only trainee planner in the department and to be fair it was a pretty nascent department, trying to work out how to make planning and planners a success in the agency at a time when Planning was not the all-conquering discipline it is today! 🔦 People rapidly included me in brief writing sessions and client meetings and I started to get the hang of what was required. It was very enjoyable. But I got no formal training and became an unwilling adherent of the Make It Up As You Go Along School of Planning. My drawer filled up with office tat. I went to the pub with creatives, hung around the more strategic account people and spent a lot of time on the train to Kettering to advise Weetabix on their tracking study. 🎷 And so I improvised and muddled my way through the next years, changed agency, and things got easier and better. But still no training. I swapped day-time novel reading for some memorable texts: 'Positioning. The Battle for Your Mind' and 'Built to Last' still stand out. 👩🏫 I see the same thing happening with young planners and strategists now. They are trying to muddle their way through, post-pandemic, when 'learn on the job' is not happening enough and agencies are not investing in their juniors (enough). 🌃 That's why we set up APG Night School. It's taught by a faculty of marvellous senior planners, young enough to remember how awful it can be if you're trying to muddle through, and senior enough to be able to teach - brilliantly - the skills that young Planners and strategists need to be effective and confident. 💶 It costs almost nothing to go on our 7 week course which happens once a week for a couple of hours early evening. So if you're in the same posiition as I once was, grab the chance with both hands. Email me sarahnewman@apg.org.uk or alison@apg.org.uk and we'll sort you out.

🙇♂️ I find it baffling how ready some agencies are to promote really excellent planners into senior positions and serious departmental or management responsibility, with little or no preparation. Account people at least have a management structure implicit in the way they organised. It trains them on the job how to lead people and foster team culture. But strategists get a shiny new title and just have to busk it till they work out how to do it. 🦉 So a couple of years I got together with Bridget Angear and Craig Mawdsley to work out how this gap could be filled with practical, actionable and strategy-centric teaching. We wanted to create a course on how to make it in strategy management (by-passing the 'busking it' bit). 👨🏫 Craig and Bridget (c+b) led strategy at AMVBBDO over many years and managed one of the most succcessful ever planning functions as Heads of Department and Joint CSOs. So we tried to bottle all their experience and everything they learned about how to (and how not to) do it, and created a series of Strategy Management Masterclasses. 👩🎓 We just ran the 4th iteration of these classes with guest tutors Andy Nairn Raquel Chicourel Cat Wiles Emily Harlock and Raj Nathwani Will Whalley. We covered the all important topics of managing other planners, creating culture, leading on new business, leading in the agency and managing yourself. 🤔 We had a group of lovely, serious, excellent planners who over the course of 5 weeks re-thought their role at work and learned a host of new ways of being a strategy leader with management responsibility. And no busking. 👩🏫 It's one of the most pleasurable and enlightening parts of my APG year. And I would like to pay tribute to all the delegates for giving so much to the programme, but mostly to Craig Mawdsley and Bridget Angear who donate their time to share their wisdom and experience, in a spirit of complete openness and generosity. It's a massive boost to the APG and the planning community at large, and lets us off all that busking! A great, big Thank you. 🧠 We'll be running it again in the Autumn. If you want to sign up to learn how to do it just email sarahnewman@apg.org.uk or molly@apg.org.uk and we'll put you down for it.