This is a brand new course about modern creative strategy and how to increase the influence of strategy in modern agencies. It’s for senior strategists (Strategy Director and above). It aims to show them how to increase their sphere of influence for their brands, their agencies and themselves.

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...

Every two years the leadership of the APG is enhanced with a new Chair. At the end of 2025 we said farewell to Emily Harlock and Martin Beverley, the first co-chairs of the APG, who for the last two years have been both inspiring and brilliant to work with.

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I am delighted to announce that we have once again appointed co-chairs. The new Chairs of the APG for 2026/7 are Jo Arden and Tom Roach. 

It was the strategy mash-up of the year. We brought back 7 of the winners from the APG Awards to battle it out in front of a live audience in the cinema at Channel 4.

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Each winner gave a 5-minute presentation of their thinking and then had one minute to persuade the planners in the room, and on livestream, to vote for their pitch to represent the 'tastiest' flavour of strategy.  MC David Wilding whipped the audience into a frenzy of expectation and free flowing Quality Street and Liora Ingram skipped away with the prize for advocating ‘keeping it honest and real' for Pot Noodle.

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You can watch the film of the evening, including all the speeches and some masterful mc’ing by David Wilding in a sparkly jacket. Oh, and there’s a clown and a couple of blokes in boiler suits. It is nearly Xmas after all.

The APG is a not-for-profit organisation run for and by its members: primarily account planners in advertising agencies, but increasingly the wider community of communications strategists, including media planners, channel planners and digital planners.

How talking to people in real life fuels a winning creative strategy

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Mark Hadfield of Meet the 85% interviewed a slew of award winners in detail about their method: How they use AI and what role talking to and observing people played in their strategy.

He will be debriefing his fascinating conversations with the authors and revealing how they worked, how to get the most out of real life as a strategist, and different ways to access revelatory insights.

He will be joined by Jo Arden, CSO of AMV BBDO and APG Co-Chair, who will talk about how agencies and planners can and should create the conditions in agencies to do it much more, and more successfully.

We are offering a new, free 4-month APG Stopgap membership for Planners and Strategists who have been made redundant within the last 4 months and are looking for a new role. 

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APG Stopgap Membership will offer you access to our Think Tank, events and training that we are running over the next few months. We also offer a discount on training courses for people in this situation. If you are early in your career, the benefits are further enhanced. We’ll ask you to verify your situation and will set you up if you meet the criteria.

‘’I know” said Tom. Let’s call it ‘every flavour of strategy’.

It was the end of a long session in which Tom Roach (Chair of Judges) and I were mulling over how to position the APG Creative Strategy Awards. 

We wanted to open out the awards and welcome seriously fresh thinking and innovative strategies, including different disciplines from PR to brand via one-to-one, diverse strategy models and the myriad channels now available. 

Reading that sentence you can see why we were having the conversation. 

WARC's John Bizzell goes behind the APG Grand Prix-winning campaign for a car that either sends you to sleep OR into raptures: the Skoda Octavia. Joe Crust, Strategy Director at Leo Burnett UK, takes us behind the scenes.

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Listen here or click below to watch the interview.