The Battle of Big Thinking 2 is through and now has new champion. I thought I’d give you highlights of the rounds rather than a blow-by-blow account. It was billed as a year’s thinking in a day and I can attest to feeling punch drunk by late in the afternoon. There is, indeed, a lot to absorb.

The format is simple: three people per round, each given 15 minutes, with the audience voting at the end of each round. The winner of each round went into an eliminator vote to find the supreme champion at the end of the day.

Marketing

Things kicked off with the marketing and planning rounds, which surprised me rather.  I would have thought we would proceed through more modest bouts to marketing at the end of the day. If you had got stuck in traffic you were in danger of missing one of the most important exchanges.

And the first round had 3 extremely senior and able marketers on the canvas, hardly a warm-up act. But perhaps with Amanda Mackenzie of British Gas in the final Green session, the organizers may have felt that they had a 3 star general in the wings.

Fru Hazlitt opened with an impassioned plea for optimism. She claimed that pessimistic headlines driven by short-termism were contributing to the media’s woes. An interesting view, because I was under the impression that worried, insecure

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