(and a huddle for warmth in a cupboard)
When the APG was founded in 1979 it was pretty small beer. At that time there were only a few pioneer planners and it was hard going to establish the new discipline in agencies suspicious of change. So a number of planners from competitor agencies got together. They figured that if they had a common aim and supported each other intellectually and personally, they had a better chance of successfully establishing the new ways of working in the industry more generally.
The founders described it as a huddle for warmth in a cupboard.
Fast forward to the end of 2023. December. I picked up the phone (very analogue of me) to eminent strategist Tom Roach. I was intrigued and concerned about the onward march of GenAI and what it was going to do to our industry; for good and ill. I was reading lots of stuff and watching the beginning of an arms race of tools and not finding any of it particularly insightful. Or in the least bit practical.
And obviously I was alternately intrigued/fascinated/terrified about how it would come to shape the role and impact of strategists.
I asked Tom if he would chair a ‘working group’ of planners so that we could work out some kind of collective strategy for dealing with and embracing GenAI.
And if your heart sinks at the prospect of hearing about the work of the ‘working group’, I’m with you.
So skipping over 8 months of toil we fast forward to November 2024. Last week in fact. 790 planners from around the world had signed up to attend our online event: ‘AI: A Plan for Strategists’.
The event was free and open to anyone who was interested. This was absolutely in the spirit of the whole project.
4 groups of strategists from competitor agencies had been working across borders to come up with a series of recommendations about how we can start to shape the impact of AI on our discipline in important areas. Things like the tools we use, how we need to hone our critical faculties in very specific ways, what AI means for advertising effectiveness and how the role of the strategist is changing and what we need to do about it. They highlighted the frameworks and ideas that we can all use to get a grip on this momentous change.
The feedback we got was astonishing: About the frameworks that were shared, the insights and challenges and the practical reccos and implications we need to work on.
And of course, in the spirit of the initiative, you can watch the event, read the decks, plunder our research and delve into the brilliant and practical Big APG AI Toolkit.
It’s all on our site and free and open to all.
There will be consultancies and companies and social media ‘planning gurus’ who raid all this ‘content’ for their own purposes. Fair enough. But I would say two things:
The first is that the planners and strategists who did all the work over those months said it was one of the best things they’d done all year. They loved the cross-agency, cross-border working with other strats they’d never met before. That spirit that inspired the thinking and the ideas.
The second is about APG. We are a collective, a not-for-profit run by and for planners and strategists. It’s the power of that brand and the community spirit that we have built together over the years that allowed us to pull off such a great big community action.
And leave the cupboard behind.
Here's to Tom Roach, Anna Bulman, Christina Lemieux, Feranmi Akintola, Franky Farmer, George Gangar, Guy Murphy, Jess Lovell, Josh Taylor Dadds, Mara Dettmann, Maximilian Weigl, Rory Natkiel, Ruairi Curran, Tom Morton, Kerensa Ayivor and Ben Thomas.
Sarah Newman
APG Director
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