Sunday, April 27, 2008

Fast Strategy



Tomorrow (28th April) is the IPA Strategy's conference: 'Fast Strategy'.

I'm pleased to say that by being part of the IPA Strategy Group, I've had a small part to play in helping get this show off the ground.

It promises to be a lot of fun. We've got three teams (leaders are Mark Earls, Phil Georgiadis and Johnny Hornby). They're taking a COI brief in the morning, to come back with their strategies in the afternoon. In the meantime, the conference attendees can listen to some thoughts and ideas from the great and the good of ad-land, with TBWA, Wiedens, Grand Union, the Times, Naked, and Leo Burnetts all doing a turn.

At £150 a pop, it's actually pretty good value for a day of good speakers. But I know I've not found it easy signing this off (yes even group members have to pay... the IPA aren't going to miss out on any possible income!).

So I hope the attendance is good, the speakers are great and people enjoy the fun and frivolities.

My money's on Mark E's team to crack the COI brief... not sure if anyone's actually running a book though???

What this space for a (not so impartial) review.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

sadly the day was pretty weak.

who won the insipid pitch (which btw was actually a REAL pitch that we answered 8 months ago!)?

I thought the first team did the best set-up but had the weakest implementation, the second team waffled on far too much up front but had some genuinely interesting implementational ideas - though no idea how to seed or grow them, and the third team had the slickest presentation but nothing interesting to say whatsoever.

oh well, i don't feel so bad about not winning it now anyways.

thinking I might sign up to the APG instead.

Gagey said...

Team 1 won, with team 2 close behind. CHI were trailing a lot in 3rd - gutted no doubt. (Particularly as they brought along most of their agency, so their own folk must have voted against them).

I'll do a post later on the day with my overall thoughts. On the whole, most people seemed to enjoy it and get value out of it, which has to be the main outcome. And the IPA are happy...

But I agree that there were no new ideas and many of the presentations were sadly quite limited / plugs for their own agencies. Leo's presentation was particularly shocking, talking about others' ideas....