Posts Tagged ‘apgdigital’
APG Netherlands. Shaping a new Home for Strategists.
Oktober 18th, 2011 • Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Amsterdam, APG, apgdigital, Article, Netherlands, new biz, Strategy, World
Most of you know that I live in Amsterdam for a while now – a city with many agencies, some Strategists but almost without connecting links between them.
A couple of months ago I wrote about an idea that some of my fellow Strategists and I carried around with us for a while: Founding an Account Planning Group in the Netherlands. I don’t want to go too much into detail here but all of us sensed that the small but very international Planner community in the Netherlands needed more exchange, progress, representation and also standardization. The result was one of the most pragmatic professional processes I have ever been part of. Yesterday we simply founded the Dutch franchise of the British (and Global) Account Planning Group – as guild of Planners here.
Our plan: to create a professional community for strategists that serves as forum for knowledge exchange, inspiration and networking for our little group of Strategists. We haven’t got many resources right now. But we are happy to welcome any brand and communications strategists in the Netherlands who want to help us shape this platform for the Strategists in the Netherlands (be they Dutch or not)
If you are one of them…
- sign up for our Linked-in group and spread the news
- join us for our opening event on Nov 17 at Strawberry Frog Amsterdam
- help us shape this group
A couple of weeks ago I have written an article for German magazine New-Business (which is closely connected with the German APG) about this process. I am looking forward to see us make the new APG NL become part of Europe’s Planner guilds.
The article (in German). Please click it to see it full size.
APG Netherlands. Does Holland need a Strategy Foundation?
Juli 31st, 2011 • 6 comments People
Tags: Amsterdam, APG, apgdigital, Netherlands, Strategy
I live in Amsterdam for a bit more than a year now. There is an old joke about Germans (no, not the one with the towels or with invading other countries) that whenever you put a German somewhere he will try to found some type of club. And I am no exception to this rule.
After arriving in Amsterdam I tried to get in contact with (professionally) likeminded people. And I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t quite easy to meet other Strategists. I knew some of the local Strategists via twitter but all connections 
between them were 100% personal – either you knew a couple of your colleagues from other agencies or you didn’t. No real professional network structured collaboration of the Dutch and the Expat Strategists in and beyond Amsterdam.
Thanks to the support of (the perfectly well connected) Heather Le Fevre I was able to invite the major share of Amsterdam’s Brand/Account/Creative/Younameit Planners to a bimonthly ‘Stammtisch‘ event which we organize via a Facebook Group (feel free to apply for access if you consider yourself a Amsterdam Strategist). Our little group has grown to more than 60 Planners in and around Amsterdam and we meet on a regular basis.
But honestly – shouldn’t interaction between Strategists in the Netherlands be more than an informal Beer every once in a while? I think it should. And I would like to discuss whether this should be something they call Account Planning Group (APG) in the UK and in Germany. Yes, I am talking about a formal institution.
So what is an APG and why is it purposeful? APG UK defines the mission in the following way
- Encourage dialogue among the members and provide a ‘home’ for planners, representing the interests of the planning community.
- Provide training especially for younger members of the community
- Give access to Case Studies
- Enable new publications on the subject of planning, contributing to other publications, and organising various events and debates.
APG is a not-for-profit organisation run for and by its members. That means it needs some kind of membership fees. And it also usually requires a small team to run day-to-day operations on behalf of the larger community. If you want to learn more about the role of the Account Planning Group check out the UK’s APG website.
Digital Strategy. Let’s start the discourse.
August 14th, 2009 • 3 comments Underway
Tags: apgdigital, Planning, Presentation, Strategy, Underway, Workshop
You know how these things start.
You discuss with friends, you drink wine and finally you’re convinced you got a ‘really good idea the world definitely is waiting for’…
About 6 months ago, the people on this picture asked themselves what digital strategy is. Is there a digital planning? If yes, what makes it different to what we did since the 1970s? There were a lot of question marks.
The only thing which was clear was, none of knew if there is a real genuine digital planning approach. We knew we did something different…but we didn’t exactly know what. And I believe this open question made us structure a workshop for traditional account planners which took place last friday and saturday: An open discourse in which we asked
As I said earlier: This workshop wasn’t only about ‘teaching’ digital to traditional planners. It was about defining something for us. About understanding challenges in nowaday’s traditional agencies. Simply because we don’t believe digital planning (if there is one) is ‘winning’. But because we think traditional planning simply evolves and turns into Planning +, 2.0, XP, Vista or iPlanning (you get the idea) as digital turns into mainstream.
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