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- [00:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carroll in a snow covered Chicago. We've got a lot of cold weather and snow here in our wonderful city. No surprise to most people. A couple of upcoming episodes we have. We've got Tinder coming up. We also have Uber. It's actually Uber for business. Going to be an interesting conversation. We also have the Duluth Trading Company, which is men's and women's workwear. You guys may be familiar with the advertising. It's been going on for a couple of years. Really intriguing, sort of in the Red Bull style of illustrated ads and really funny stuff and well worth the conversation. So we're gonna be having that episode in a few weeks. We are also gonna be getting back on the road with our live shows. We're gonna be live from Toronto in February. We're trying to secure the actual date and I'll give you some more as we learn some more. But I'll give you more in the next week or two. Excited about that. We're also gonna be doing a Super bowl episode. Advertising from the Chicago area. I actually think of High Dive as almost being America's super bowl agency. They do a lot of super bowl ads. So we're going to be talking about their approach to it and about some of the work that they have in the super bowl this coming February. I think it's early February. We're going to do it just after the super bowl so we can talk about the specific executions. And then lastly, we've got a great B2B series coming out with LinkedIn starting in I think two weeks. And it is. We have four or five episodes celebrating great work in B2B and we want to be able to do that. A lot of people are trying to do more of that to encourage B2B to become a little more creative and considerate. Considerate of innovative thinking in their execution. So we've got Informatica coming up, which will be our first episode and they are an enterprise cloud data management company. And then we're going to be talking to Procel, which is a great case out of London from vml and I'm very excited about that. Really funny, entertaining work. So, you know, B2B can be as entertaining and emotionally loaded as B2C. So that's coming up. So here's a clip from today's episode.
- [02:28]
Tom Roach
We could have come to conclusions and there is a scenario in which strategists are decimated. We can't possibly know that for sure yet and we certainly didn't want to kind of predict that it would happen. But in this module I think there were four different possible scenarios of where things might go. It's too for us to be definitive, but, you know, they range from the kind of utopian world where, you know, we're the kind of the masses of strategy and we head upstream and all these tools are just beneath us doing our bidding. And then there was a kind of super dystopian view which is we become incredibly kind of downstream. And I think it was called the tech feudalism, where we just end up doing some awful grunt work or not even having jobs at all. So of course, naturally we would hope we'll be somewhere in the middle.
- [03:25]
Fergus O'Carroll
That's Tom Roach. Tom is VP of Strategy at Jellyfish in London. He's joined by Sarah Newman, who is the director of the apg, which is the Account Planning Group out of London. Now, they have undertaken an initiative that started just a month or two ago which is assessing the role, benefits and threats of AI to the strategy community and to strategy as a practice area. This is distinct from its role in the development of creative and its influence on creative. It's looking at strategists and looking at the impact on strategy from the point of view of people within the industry. So they've gathered significant group of people that are now working on separate projects that you're going to hear about in this interview. And each of those sort of subgroups are reporting out on their topic. And the first one that came out was the AI toolkit which is now available. And throughout this episode we're going to be talking about the different buckets of report outs that are going to be happening in 2025, how you can learn from that, the information is all free and also how you can get involved in that if you want to sort of shape the that the industry is thinking about it, or to monitor or help assess how we can apply a lot of this new technology. So this is going to be an interesting one and I think we'll stay with our ears to the ground on this over the next few months as APG begins to roll out this information. So this is Tom Roach and Sarah Newman on APG and their new AI initiative. Enjoy. So Sarah, we've done a number of episodes on APG award winning cases which have been phenomenal, some of the best in the world. And I take great comfort as we've been doing the show live in a number of major cities in the US and we were over in Europe too. And I'm Finding it really encouraging that there's a lot more recognition for APG here in the US now than I ever remember being in the past. For those who don't know it too well, tell us about what is the APG and what are some of the outputs?
- [05:36]
Sarah Newman
That's a lovely question. So the APG very quickly was actually formed in 1979 in London, and it was formed by a group of original planners and strategists and agencies like JWT and BMP who really felt that it's very difficult to get this new discipline going because they were in a minority and they were fought. They were having lots of challenges in implementing it in agencies. So they got together together and they said, let's just chat about how we can do this in a more fruitful way and support each other to make it more successful and powerful. And they described the early APG meetings as a huddle for warmth in a cupboard because they were so. And it's a lovely story because now if you look at the APG, here we are at the end of 2024, we have like over a thousand members worldwide. We do these massive awards every two years. We do events and training and all kinds of stuff. But for me, the essential thing is that original community spirit is still live. And the thing about being a planner or strategist in an agency is it can feel like a really minority pursuit because you're often a much smaller department in some agencies, you've maybe only got two or three planners and strategists working. And there is this sense that when you're doing something which can have a massive impact, there aren't loads of you doing it, you have to do it together. And for creative strategies to be really successful and to really build brands and businesses and help clients, the quality of, of the people doing it has to get better and better. So we need to be training each other, we need to talk to each other, we need to get brilliant practitioners to come and do our training courses, not just people who chat on the Internet and all of those sort of. That sense of the spirit of being a community seems to be a really galvanizing force. And that force also seems to be getting stronger over time as there are more and more things militating against that. So we're leaning into that sense of a powerful community that can work together and that can really support each other other and also try and showcase the best of what all of us do. So you mentioned the APG Creative Strategy Awards. We run those every two years and we will be launching again in January 2025, which is extremely exciting.
- [07:48]
Fergus O'Carroll
So let's talk about this new initiative. Tell us about where it all came from, Tom. How did it start out? And how would you describe it?
- [07:59]
Tom Roach
Yeah, so Sarah and I were trying to remember where the exact moment when it happened, we think it was about a year ago. And the APG run some AI training, which was a new training course. I'd sent somebody on it who'd loved it and really enjoyed it. And we got chatting, Sarah and I, about what we could do next and whether there was a need for more than just training. And I was feeling, I think, like many planners and strategists, a sense of both excitement about this future that we're all embarking on and how things are going to change and evolve, but also some nervousness and some anxiety around and concerns around what was this going to mean for the role of a strategist? Would it continue to be a discipline that would matter in the future? And we both had a sense that. That things were going to change, possibly for good and ill. So we had this idea to come up with a working group, slightly boring, titled the APG AI Working Group. And it literally was to use this collaborative energy that Sarah was describing before. That has always been part of both the apg, but also the planning community more generally. We're quite a collaborative bunch mostly, and I don't tend to be competitive in terms of being, you know, worrying about conflicts between agencies and that kind of stuff. So we had this idea to create this group, and we put out a call to arms, I think. In February, I wrote a blog post which was called Humans Wanted, and we had this unbelievable response. I mean, you know, write LinkedIn posts and sometimes they just kind of evaporate and nothing happens. But in this case, we had hundreds of people put up their hands and want to be involved. And it clearly hit a nerve of some kind. It triggered, I think, the same kinds of feelings, both positive and more fearful about what's going on, and a desire for planners globally to be involved and to help out and do some research and be part of a group that we're going to be working together to come up with some real actionable solutions.
- [10:15]
Sarah Newman
It was interesting at that stage because we were talking about committees and how do you get things done with people? And how having a committee can be one of the worst things you can possibly do to come up with good outcomes. And we wanted to make it as broad as possible. So, Tom, putting up that call was amazing. And what we felt was There was so much enthusiasm out there that we needed to carry on drawing on it, but we needed to have smaller groups of people who were going to work together quite seriously who are actually going to do the work. And like you probably know, Fergus, whenever you put out some kind of voluntary initiative, lots of people will put their hand up and say, yeah, I want to do it, but only a certain number will follow through. And we're interested in identifying those people who were really into following through. And so we asked those who wanted to get. Get really involved and take on specific subjects. And we sort of hand picked as diverse a bunch as we possibly could from those people and crunched them together into teams and started talking about the things that we wanted to work on.
- [11:13]
Fergus O'Carroll
I mean, did you find that it was a group that was struggling or a group that was excited to share? I mean, were they looking for knowledge or were they looking to share?
- [11:24]
Sarah Newman
The original big group, I would say, were more at the forefront of thinking about all of this stuff. So they were engaged and they wanted to get better knowledge and understanding and learn from each other.
- [11:39]
Tom Roach
I don't think anybody was struggling so much. I think there were also lots of people who wanted to be part of something to really understand what's going on. And we definitely have got a sense throughout this whole thing that lots and lots of planners are just in the foothills of it. Everybody's dabbling a little bit, but really wants help to understand where it's going and how they can use it better in their jobs.
- [12:03]
Fergus O'Carroll
So when you look at where you are today, was there any involvement by the tech platforms themselves, by the folks behind AI? Was their voice in it in terms of them explaining what their plans are for the technology? Or was it assumed that kind of already had that sense or had that.
- [12:25]
Tom Roach
Perspective to a certain degree? So we were conscious, in fact, we were conscious from the beginning that if we put out this call to arms to get people to join, we might get lots of tech startups joining. And we were a little bit conscious of not wanting to be influenced too much by people selling to us, which could have happened. It didn't happen, actually, as it turned out. So we did have lots of people on the groups who have their own little startups they're dabbling with, developing products. We also had people on the wider group who are from the bigger platforms, not necessarily technical people, but people who are kind of more on the strategy side, working at some of the big ad tech companies. If this had been a program about creative production tools, I think that would have been more at the kind of cutting edge of things because that's probably where this stuff is more advanced at the moment. I think the strategy tools are a bit looser, a bit less developed.
- [13:28]
Fergus O'Carroll
So let's dive in. I believe, Sarah, that this started with a quant survey amongst planners and strategists who had sort of reached out or you guys have connections with. Is that where it started and what was the purpose of that base quants study?
- [13:46]
Sarah Newman
Well, third of, we're planners, so we will start with a really good bit of this study.
- [13:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
Or we could have just asked AI.
- [13:54]
Sarah Newman
We could have done. Actually we did do a bit of that and it was funny, but that's another story. No, we just basically wanted to understand where planners and strategists are now in terms of using these tools. Precisely. What are people doing at the moment who's using these tools, who's engaged with it, what's good about it, what's bad about it? And I would really encourage people listening to this podcast to go on the APG site and look at the research and look at the findings and look at the data. But there are some things that came out of it, I guess, which are very interesting to me. And the first thing is actually about the sample that we got for this. And obviously we were putting this out into the field using social and using the APG database and all the rest of it. So we were bringing in people who had some interest in it. It was more male and much older than the industry is generally. For example, 48% of the respondents were over 40. And that doesn't really reflect who is out there at the moment.
- [14:53]
Fergus O'Carroll
Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's not a younger cohort that's responding to the survey.
- [14:59]
Sarah Newman
At least to be absolutely honest, Fergus, I can't answer that question. And it does surprise and because it's.
- [15:08]
Fergus O'Carroll
Not that they're not using it, it's just that they did not respond and participate in the survey is what that's saying.
- [15:12]
Sarah Newman
It's also that they're using these tools less. There seems to be less action and less thought amongst younger people for these tools than there is amongst older males. Also, there is less representation by women than there is by men. So there are issues about who is really engaged and who's using AI at work.
- [15:34]
Fergus O'Carroll
But that's amongst the sample. Right? Am I missing this? Amongst the sample that were who took the survey, could it be a sample problem and not an actual real world usage problem?
- [15:45]
Tom Roach
We think it's probably both I mean, I think on the kind of older males taking surveys about tech, it sort of seems likely that there's going to be and particularly I guess we were distributing on email and LinkedIn and things, so there's probably some kind of bias setting in the sample.
- [16:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
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- [17:10]
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- [17:40]
Fergus O'Carroll
Now back to the show. What's great about this is that you're going to be rolling content out over time and a part of it is already rolled out, which we'll talk about in a minute. But then the plan is to roll more out in early 2025. These sort of report outs on these four buckets. So I'm just wondering, let's talk about that because what's great about this is it's going to be available to everybody on the APG website. Sarah. Right. So do you need to be a member of apg and if you want to be a member, how do you do that? By the way, it's a very reasonable number to become a member.
- [18:17]
Sarah Newman
Yes, it's about 200 pounds to become a member. And if you're a member of the apg, you get access to almost everything that we do. That said, because we have the support of our Members and some wonderful partners, we're able to offer some things for free. So we have done the whole of this AI initiative, this project, for the good of the whole community. So right now, if you go to our site, whoever you are, you can read the research, you can see the video of the presentation that we did last month, you can see all of the details of the presentations that the four teams did and that you can just use it, anybody can use it, you can write journalism about it, you can do podcasts about it, whatever. But please always credit the people who did that work and the apg, because we want to make it all available to everybody.
- [19:08]
Fergus O'Carroll
What's the URL for that? Is it apg.com or is it.org I'm trying to remember. It's apg.yourorg.uk apg.org.uk okay, awesome. Okay. So, Tom, can we talk about what's come out so far? I watched the presentation, there's an hour long video presentation that's up yesterday. I watched it. Super interesting. I got through the whole thing, so it's not boring. So tell us about what's the plan look like, what have you done so far and what can we expect?
- [19:39]
Tom Roach
Okay, so people can watch the video. The 10 minute highlights of each of the four groups. The four groups were the role of the strategist, Tools and practices, quality controls, which encompasses ethics and bias and kind of important issues like that. And the fourth one was effectiveness. And the first one that has launched is Tools and Practices. And it's a, it's actually, it's just a brilliantly simple thing. We wanted things to be as practical, as actionable as possible. And this was an early idea that came out of the process which was to develop a resource that would help planners and strategists see what is available, but literally list a spreadsheet of possible tools that they can use, ways how you can use those things, what role they can play in the strategy process, links to them, who they're owned by, who they're accessible to, and then what we're going to do is have reviews of them as well. So there's a kind of a way for people to submit their own perspectives on those tools. And in time, what we want is people to show case studies of how they've used them and outputs from them. So that is a living resource that will get better and better as people use it, get more practical, more useful, and will be something that is as new. As new tools become available, we'll want to provide kind of little Mini reviews of them. So really simple, practical resource for all planners and strategists to be able to use. And there's a fun additional thing on there which we're calling the AI diet. So people can provide, can give a kind of overview of the AI tools that they're using in their daily life and their work as a sort of way of seeing a kind of practical how people are using it in their day to day work.
- [21:41]
Fergus O'Carroll
So there's four sort of buckets, we'll say there's four topics that you're going to be reporting out upon. The one you just mentioned is sort of the big APG AI toolkit. That one's already posted. People can check that out now. The next one, I believe is Role of the Strategist, which is in essence dealing with the topic of what is the value of the strategist in this new AI world. So talk us through what, what can we expect from that and when will that be released?
- [22:12]
Sarah Newman
For me, one of the most important things about the role of the strategist is how do we envision what junior strategists, junior planners of the future are going to be doing? Because they are the future of our discipline, they're also the future of our world. And there's an interconnection for us, which we're going to make a big thing of next year, between the importance of diversity of thought, diversity of representation, and how there are issues with AI in terms of the diversity of opinion and data going into it and conserving the role of junior or thinking about and evolving the role of junior strategists over time. Because at the moment, a lot of the craft skills in inverted commas that junior strategists are taught with things like analyzing research data, coming up with an opinion, doing bits of research can be readily done by a series of AI tools, well or badly, rightly or wrongly. And so we need to think very carefully about how we build the craft skills for junior people now in agencies. But we also, as Tom was saying, make sure that they have access to the tools which can really make sure that they are staying up to date with what's going on in the discipline and also able to make the best contribution they possibly can.
- [23:34]
Tom Roach
I think there was a very strong sense in the group that we didn't want to just kind of go, just hold up our hands and go, okay, that's it, we're not going to need to be used anymore. We could have come to conclusions. And there is a scenario in which strategists are decimated. We can't possibly know that for sure yet and we certainly didn't want to kind of predict that it would happen. But in this module I think there were four different possible scenarios of where things might go. It's two too early for us to be definitive, but you know, they range from the kind of, you know, utopian world where, you know, we're the kind of the masters of strategy and we head upstream and all these tools are just beneath us doing our bidding. And then there was a kind of super dystopian view which is we become incredibly kind of downstream. And I think it was called the tech feudalism, where we just, we just end up doing some awful grunt work or not even having jobs at all. So of course naturally we would hope we'll be somewhere in the middle. But yeah, I mean this module is quite philosophical in a way and quite existential and it's probably too early to be definitive about what does the role of the strategies end up being. So it's a fascinating topic and of course one that strategists were very, very into to kind of getting to grips with.
- [25:03]
Sarah Newman
I actually had a worrying conversation with a head of strategy in a well known big agency the other day who said that his junior people were not really using the tools, they didn't really understand them. You know, it wasn't part of the way they worked. And that did concern me because I.
- [25:19]
Fergus O'Carroll
Felt that is so shocking to me. I would have thought that they would have been some of the early adopters.
- [25:26]
Sarah Newman
I think it wasn't necessarily reflective of all, but there is an element of that that. So for me, training, reading, keeping yourself up to date, talking to other people, all the stuff that planners and strategists need to do for their work anyway is particularly important for this because you have to take some personal responsibility for understanding what's good and what's bad and how you can make your contribution, your work better using these tools. And we need more of that. We will be doing more training next year and we'll be doing more work like this and we'll be pushing out as much as possible because we want to enfold everybody in this.
- [26:03]
Fergus O'Carroll
So for those struggling with those questions, particularly for strategists and trying to understand what their role might be in the future or what's going to be forced upon them, is the output of this Tom, like this module, role of the strategist, is it to sort of. Is it not only it's on one hand to educate people, but it is also to equip them to make the argument for the role and the role of AI within the agency, because it may not be unilaterally rolled out across all agencies in the same way, but there may be the ability for the strategist to influence how AI is used for the benefit of both the agency and the client's business. So is it sort of helping them make the argument as well as helping them understand?
- [26:46]
Tom Roach
I think it will absolutely do both those things. And one of the conclusions was really about making sure you and your agency as a strategist have a voice in, in making sure that strategy has a place within the new workflow. One of the things that agencies are doing at the moment is building in AI tools into their workflows, making the new processes work with these tools. And mostly I think that's happening at the sort of production end of things and partly in the creative part of the process. We mustn't forget the importance of injecting ourselves into this strategic moment. Or we could get left behind. There's always a possibility of strategy getting left behind. We're not as vocal as we should be about the importance and value of our work. And if you're a loan strategist in an island, in any kind of agency or in house, you can get forgotten if you're not advocating for the importance of your role generally. But if you're not advocating for the importance of your role in an AI world, then I think you're going to struggle. So it's so important. I think, I think mostly this module is provocation, emphasis on training and giving ourselves a kind of picture of what the future could be like for good or ill, so that people can then get a bit of confidence that they need to speak up and make a case for themselves and their work.
- [28:21]
Fergus O'Carroll
And one other point on that would be that there's a danger in all of this that planners come up and they are afraid to admit that they're using these tools in part to do what they do. And you've got to be honest about how you're using these tools and not try to claim them as being your own original thinking. You've got to be willing to not use it as a proxy for original thinking, of course, but not be afraid to normalize it.
- [28:53]
Sarah Newman
I think on that, an interesting thing to say is that if it's freeing you up to do more higher order things, then that has to be built into the work schedule and the resource that the client and the agency have agreed. Because what you don't want to happen is with strategists doing lots and lots of work really, really quickly. And because they've got time available, they're doing more of that grunt work really quickly. You're looking for the opposite of that. And that's part of the agency model and how the agency financial model needs to take into account that as well.
- [29:21]
Tom Roach
Well, yes, how. How you use the time saved is a. Is a really important. Interesting, interesting one. This thing about not owning up. I just. I mean, it's a. I guess it's a personal choice and there'll be many instances where people keep it quiet. I think it's quite fun to talk about. It's a really interesting topic and it's. You're not going to. I think on balance, the net net of talking about how you're using these tools is probably more beneficial to everybody. In. In. In. In. At least you know, how they view you as a strategist and seeing that you're using all the possible tools available to you at the moment, it's quite a fun experiment. I did a thing last week where we were for a campaign. We were looking to do one thing a day for a year. And, you know, basic ChatGPT question was quite a fun thing to do to look at. Okay, give me 365 ideas that we could put out every day for this brand. Now, of course, most of them were not good, but 30, 40 of them were really interesting and have become part of the creative campaign. So it's fun, actually. And I think we shouldn't be too gloomy about the unoriginality of some of the outputs or this kind of dystopian future that some people paint or getting.
- [30:36]
Sarah Newman
Good at using the tools and using them creatively and interestingly is in itself an important thing to be able to do. And I think that should be valued.
- [30:44]
Fergus O'Carroll
Exactly right. That's the point I was gonna make, which is it's become the new skill. When we did our show in New York, our live show in New York, one of the creative directors on our panel said, well, this is just like Adobe Photoshop back in the day, where it made you a better art director. It allowed you to do things faster, better. It sort of fueled your own creativity because you were able to see your ideas come to life quicker and you could improve upon them and iterate on. On them. It's the same thing here. It's how you use this tool can actually make you a more valuable strategist, not just in your ability to prompt, but in your ability to deliver for a client.
- [31:22]
Tom Roach
So you'll know Mark Pollard and his training and his conferences. One of my strategists went on one of his things and there was a brilliant tool that somebody talked about, which was an insight generator. It was a prompt essentially that you can put into the models and it churns out a lot of interesting things. Now, of course, you need to apply critical thinking to which of those 40 insights that were generated are useful and interesting? And one of the. In fact, we come onto one of the. I think it was the second or was it third module that we had was all about this. How do you make sure that you're applying this fundamental planning tool called critical thinking to the work that is being generated? And it was interesting. In the process of discussing this, their work, and that whole notion of critical thinking and discussing what happens when somebody has an insight, you probably lack that light bulb moment. I mean, whoever has a light bulb moment, they don't come very often, but when they do, you feel it and you have that great kind of moment of excitement and you share the idea, you share the thought and you have that. That is something that is slightly missing from the process when you are generating ideas or insights using these tools. And we need to find ways to compensate for that. That. And of course, that can only really be in being really critical of the ideas that are generated and being and trying to replicate the kind of, you know, looking at them hard and testing them and pushing them and looking at.
- [33:00]
Sarah Newman
Them hard and testing them, pushing them in the company of other people as well. Because often the light bulb moment you described comes in a conversation where one of you has a really good idea and it's the other one who can point out that actually that's an insight or a thought that could make a huge difference. This, you don't necessarily see it yourself when you first come up with it. So it's using the AI tools as a kind of a collaborative partner, but bringing people into that debate as well.
- [33:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah, it's not unlike, you know, when you're working on a client project and you're looking for inspiration in different places. You might look at old case studies, you might get a clip from a presentation from the past. You might have a conversation with somebody in the real world and they're useful thoughts and inputs, but ultimately, towards the end of your process of trying to come up with something, they fall away. They don't end up being the thing that you end up using. They inspire the thing that you end up presenting. So I've always found that you can surround yourself by great inputs, but they're all just inspiration that end up unlocking it. Whatever. It connects the dots inside of you and allows you to come up with an even better idea. You can't just stop with what you get either from ChatGPT or you get from a case study or you get from another strategist. They're all phenomenal building blocks if you use them in the right way. And you end up still having original thinking.
- [34:25]
Sarah Newman
Absolutely.
- [34:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
So let's talk about the next one. So the one last thing I roll of the strategist, what is the next output and when is that going to happen and what form is it going to take? Is it a discussion group? Is it a report?
- [34:38]
Sarah Newman
Exactly, exactly. So the group who've been running that particular work stream in adverted commas are going to be assembling a group in the new year to talk about what came out of their thinking, which was just the 10 minutes that people saw. And it's 10 minutes worth. You can read now. And to work and to become ever more practical about what we think the recommendations are, but also to talk and to think really, really carefully about the things I was talking about earlier, which is the role of more junior people and, and trying to reimagine the role of the strategist in the future in maybe a more imaginative and a more forward looking way than this work has done so far, which has been very much about laying the groundwork and getting everybody together and putting everyone into a space where there is a common understanding of what the issues are and what we can do.
- [35:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
So the first bucket we talked about was the AI toolkits available now Role of the strategists will be available in the new year. The next bucket is, is the one that I think is going to have the second most debate around which is effectiveness. So is AI going to contribute to more effective marketing? Is AI going to make you a more effective strategist? What's the point of view and what's this bucket about?
- [35:55]
Tom Roach
So this one, it was less about AI on the effectiveness of strategy and more about AI on as a, as a, you know, is it going to lead to more effective creative work? We couldn't at this point have a conclusion, a definitive conclusion. There's not enough published case studies if any right now from kind of reputable, you know, non kind of sales material about how is this, how is Gen I created work actually impacting sales brand growth in the marketplace. I think some of us have seen examples where it's happening, but we couldn't make absolute kind of definitive claims about that.
- [36:40]
Fergus O'Carroll
And there's probably two distinctions, Simon. There's AI created work and there's AI influenced work, right?
- [36:47]
Tom Roach
Yeah. And it of course exists on a huge spectrum from where AI has just been used as a small component of a production process through to completely AI generated ideas which we're not seeing that many of yet or completely AI produced creative. And of course there's, you know, as we've already talked about, there's many, many roles of AI through the process, not least in the strategy process that we've been focusing on. So what we did do for this module was we laid out a kind of example of how could, like a model for how could Genai improve roi? Now we're aware that ROI has its flaws. We essentially said, okay, how is it going to impact efficiency? How is it going to impact time and cost savings, production savings, how is it going to impact effectiveness overall? And there are some theories there about how we believe it could do those things. So a little bit theoretical at the moment, we want to begin to fill out each of the components of the ROI calculation essentially and find case studies where, where Gen AI creative work has made cost savings, where it's made time savings, where it's made production savings, and also of course, most importantly where it's improved the overall incremental profit or sales for a business. And it's only by looking at all of those components can you say in the round, is it an improver of roi? Is it going to kind of make things take.
- [38:27]
Fergus O'Carroll
So our last topic here, we just have a couple of minutes left. Here is an extension of what we just talked about, which is the importance of critical thinking, that we have to apply critical thinking to what we're getting from these tools. We can't necessarily trust it straight up. Tom. We've got to be able to look at our responsibility as strategists, our ethics, our integrity, not only to share where we're sourcing this from, but to, to double check it. I think in the video somebody mentioned the importance of the journalism model, which is you got to have three sources, you've got to sort of fact check as best you can what's coming out of these systems. So what do you think this module of critical thinking is about?
- [39:12]
Tom Roach
I mean, I think it's absolutely everything you just said and it was just a great reminder of the importance of quality in this speed obsessed world. We can forget that and we move very, very quickly and we can forget to check things. There was a really important component of this module, which was, in fact, it started out being about ethics and a concern about bias and a concern about responsibility and responsible use of these tools. And we thought that critical thinking was a really good overarching theme for it. So we must not be uncritical of these things. But then I don't think we should ever be uncritical of any data source. You can only. I think we're always taught, aren't we, that we shouldn't be reliant on only one data source. And this is a kind of data source, or it can be a kind of data source. There was an interesting finding from it that people felt that its use in data was going to be particularly important. And I mean, there are conflicting views on this. Where real data scientists can be concerned about the quality of Genai data that's produced as an output, but that's in a way that's kind of above our pay grade. We're slightly reliant on the tools that get developed for us. I think one of the things that the toolkit piece maybe be able to help us with is put a voice back to the developers of different tools to make sure there is a kind of feedback loop and making sure that the APG's view or user's view is put back to the developer of tools. So these tools are good quality, that they're using the right, you know, they've got their ethics sorted, et cetera, and they're not biased.
- [41:01]
Sarah Newman
This is necessarily quite a, kind of a philosophical topic and one of the things we wanted to do with this whole project is to encourage the teams to come up with really quite practical recommendations. And for me, one of the really useful bits from this, if people go to our site, if you go through the presentation from the evening that we did, it's on slide 54 and it just gives you an AI quality control checklist. So if you're working in the department of people, if you're running a department, you're working with other people. Here's a whole load of things that you just need to be continuously mindful of when you're using these tools and when you're interacting with AI at work, they make a lot of sense. They're not kind of revolutionary, but they are. Like you said, Fergus, about journalism, there are some precepts for working with these things really worth following. And I think this is just a really useful set of guidelines for people to bear in mind.
- [41:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
The modules of effectiveness and critical thinking. Are they going to follow on the heels of the role of the strategist or are they all going to roll out at the same time?
- [41:59]
Sarah Newman
They will be partly. They'll be partly to do with when the groups are ready to come back again. So what we've done is we've taken a break since our huge global presentation moment, which was wonderful. And we said, look, take a few weeks out, we'll come back in January. And we were going to put in the next phase in all of this because I don't know, I know in other parts of the world it might be different, but in the UK in December, everybody, it just goes nuts. There's no time to do anything. So we're coming back fresh in January and we will be announcing when all of these next stages in the four modules are going to happen.
- [42:30]
Fergus O'Carroll
Cool. And so it's remind us of the.
- [42:33]
Sarah Newman
URL Again, Sarah, it's apg.orguk and you go on to AI thought leadership on the site or AI for strategists.
- [42:43]
Fergus O'Carroll
Okay, cool. So everybody. And can people, can people sort of submit their emails so they're updated as things begin to drop or how do you, what do you want them to do while they're on there?
- [42:52]
Sarah Newman
Yes, they can absolutely do that on the site as well. Please do that. Yes. And if necessary, just get in touch with me personally, Sarah Newmanpg.orguk and we'll handle any questions or thoughts that people have.
- [43:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
Thanks so much to both of you. It's Tom Roach and Tom Roach is VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish in London. He's also chair of these working groups. And Sarah Newman is director of apg, the account planning group in London. Terrific organization. Encourage everybody to go to their site, sign up and become a member because the stuff may not be, they may be based in London, guys, but the stuff is relevant internationally. So you can use it and you can apply it to your business and to your brands, no matter where you are in the world. Thank you both for your time. We appreciate it very, very much. Much thanks.
- [43:41]
Sarah Newman
That was great.
- [43:42]
Fergus O'Carroll
And we will see everyone on the next episode.