Battle of Big Thinking

Yesterday I attended the Account Planning Group's Battle of Big Thinking. Loads of great stuff about brands and communication from people such as Trevor Beattie and Ivan Pollard. Over the next few days I will post some of the 'big thinking' but I wanted first to share the basics of the event - what worked and what didn't.

The Battle of Big Thinking positioned itself as being a 'different type of conference'. It took place at the Natural History Museum and was divided into seven sections; Battle of Marketing Thinking, Battle of Media Thinking, Battle of Planning Thinking etc. In each section between two and four big thinkers had fifteen minutes present their big thoughts. At the end of each section the audience used key pads to vote for a winner. With an overall winner voted for at the end of the day.

Was it any good? Well the competitive nature of the event certainly galvanised the speakers and the work that went into the presentations was impressive. Russell Davies and Ivan Pollard's presentation were particular well prepared, Russell set his 15-minutes to a rolling backdrop of YouTube sourced video and once he hit play he just had to keep up with the video which made for a really entertaining slot. A slight criticism of the speakers in general would be that the voting led to a focus on style over content. The event had a great sense of fun, with bells and fog horns used if the speakers went over time. The event had non of the formality that often bedevils conferences.

That said, this event reminded me how important quality of execution is. The fact that the room was too hot, that it took ages to queue for lunch, that you couldn't take water into the conference room, that there were a few technical difficulties, these thing really did detract from the overall experience. As mentioned watch this space for some of feedback on the big thinking content.