Google Firestarters is an ongoing series of conversations, talks and provocations designed for the planning, advertising, innovation and media community hosted by Think with Google and curated by me, Neil Perkin. They are designed to feature some of the best thinking in the industry and to facilitate debate around some of the more interesting areas of challenge and opportunity.
From 2011–2020 we ran them as a quarterly series of live events but then pivoted these to a series of video and podcast conversations with some of the most interested and interesting people in our industry. This page acts as a hub on my site for all the content related to Google Firestarters but there’s also a page on the Think With Google site featuring relevant links.
You can see an example of a recent episode (Lou Downe talking about lessons from service design practice) below, but do check out all our recent conversations over on the Firestarters YouTube playlist. Firestarters is also a podcast, and you can listen and subscribe to that via Spotify, Apple and Amazon. Enjoy.
Do check out the full playlist of episodes and the podcast featuring a ton of great insights from some excellent guests.
Here are the write ups for the live events that we ran over the course of a decade:
Firestarters 33: Thinking Differently
Firestarters 32: AI and Algorithms, Efficiency and Effectiveness
Firestarters 31: Ever Changing Marketing
Firestarters 30: The Brilliance and Brutalisation of Insight
Firestarters 20th Anniversary: Planning and Performance
Firestarters 28: Learning From The Innovators
Firestarters 27 – Crossing the River By Feeling the Stones
Firestarters 26: Change and Complexity
Firestarters 25: Patterns of Behaviour
Firestarters 24: Deciphering Digital Transformation
Firestarters 23: The Future Strategist/Planner
Firestarters 22: The Power and Perils of Fast in Planning
Firestarters 21: The Future of Digital Advertising
Firestarters 20: AI (Artificial Intelligence) or IA (Intelligence Augmentation)?
Firestarters 19: Consultants, Customer Experience and Convergence
Firestarters 18: Mobile UX is Eating the World
Firestarters 17: Content Marketing and Complexity
Firestarters 16: The Magnificent Seven
Firestarters 15: How to Think Differently About Advertising
Firestarters 14: Big Data or Big Mistake?
Firestarters 13: Agencies and Product Innovation
Firestarters 12: Designing for the Future
Firestarters 11: The Strategy is Delivery
Firestarters 10: Planning For Good
Firestarters 9 (Curated by Squared Alumni): Creativity is Not a Department
Firestarters 8: The Agency Innovation Conundrum
Firestarters 6: Digital Storytelling and Video
Firestarters 5: Cory Doctorow – The Coming War on General Computation
Firestarters 3: The New Operating System for Agencies
Firestarters 4: Entrepreneurship
Firestarters 2: Design Thinking in Planning
Firestarters 1: Agile Planning
And we also extended out the Firestarters franchise and run specific events for the performance and search marketing community:
Performance Firestarters: Secrets of Data Management
Performance Firestarters: Secrets of Growth
Performance Firestarters: The Future of Search
Performance Firestarters: Is Your Mobile Site Losing You Money?
Performance Firestarters: Will Last Click Attribution Ever Die?
Performance Firestarters: Performance vs Brand Marketing
Performance Firestarters: Marketing in a Post-Mobile World
Performance Firestarters: The Future of Programmatic
Performance Firestarters: The Future of Performance Marketing Agencies
Performance Firestarters: The Power of Feeds
Performance Firestarters: Real-time Creative
Performance Firestarters: The Profit-Driven Marketer
Performance Firestarters: Data
Search Firestarters: Search Marketing That Wins Awards
Search Firestarters: The Mobile Future
Search Firestarters: Attribution
…and we also ran a couple of Google Firestarters events in New York:
Google Firestarters NYC 2: Creativity in a Constrained World
Google Firestarters NYC: The New Operating System for Agencies
…in Cannes:
Google Firestarters: The New Culture Makers
…and in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland:
Google Firestarters Australia – Adapting Strategy for an Adaptive Age
Google Firestarters Auckland and Sydney – Digital Storytelling
…and we have also run one in Austin during SWSWi: