In this session, Matt Holt, CSO at Digitas UK, explains what critical thinking is, why it’s so vital in the age of AI and fake news, why human beings aren’t natural critical thinkers and what you can do about it.

The aim of the session being to equip you with a range of pragmatic tips, tools and techniques that Matt has picked up over the years so that you can become a master at critical thinking.

The infamous Bill Bernbach once mused that "Advertising is fundamentally persuasion". So how can you get better at persuading people? In this session, Simon Gregory (CSO at BBH, VCCP) explains the foundations of building a convincing argument and walks through some key tips from acting like a hostage negotiator to weaponizing positivity.

The APG A-Z is a series of 26 short and inspiring videos that are designed to give you all the basics for a proper understanding of the practice of planning and strategy. Whether you’re just starting out in an agency - be it in advertising, media, social, design, whatever - and have planner or strategist in your title, or you work for a client or research company and have a professional interest in strategy, this course is for you to do in your own time.

The clue is in the name. It’s the place on the APG site where we bring together all the precious bits of strategic learning that can help you navigate a tricky problem, give you fresh inspiration or just wake up your jaded planning brain when you need help but don’t know where else to go.

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To get a taster of how excellent these resources are for members, we’re giving you the chance to download one example of each for free.

It’s a first. Proper community thought leadership on AI and the future for planners. By the community, for the community. That is the whole point of the APG.

200 planners and strategists from around the globe were consulted. Then a wonderful and diverse gang of strategists were chosen to work on the topics that seemed most salient and important for us all.

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On 21st November we will unveil the top-line results.

In this special event with The Nursery, they will take us through their qual and quant research that upends most of our preconceptions and beliefs about Boomers. It’s an incredibly refreshing and surprising piece of thinking. So, come along and hear it all from the people who did the work. Sam Williams, Head of Strategy at AMV BBDO, will give us his strategist’s view.

The APG Creative Strategy Awards are on again in 2025. So if you’re true to the literal interpretation of ‘planner’ or indeed ‘planning’ you will already have started work on your entry. 

If however, you’re a by-the-seat-of-your-pants, wild, hard, last-minute-ride kind of planner (belying all practical interpretations of the ‘planning’ thing) you’ll be getting down to it sometime in early March, tripping fearlessly and with blind optimism through to the 3rd April deadline. 

But there is a middle way. And we’ve organised it for you so you don’t have to any planning (of the practical boring kind). 

Instead, you can devote your time to crafting the perfect paper.

There are 3 workshops: Logic, Magic and Sparkle. You can do 1, 2 or all 3 of them. Between them, they cover the essential ingredients of the perfect creative strategy case history delivered by the experts in writing and winning APG awards.