I felt a certain trepidation taking my seat for the 3rd Battle of Big Thinking: 7 bouts in a day with 21 speakers with 15 minutes apiece. It guarantees a ton of ideas but, remembering that a lot of stamina is required of the audience, it's a lot to pay attention to.

The idea behind the battle, run jointly by the Account Planning Group and Campaign magazine, is to have a succession of themed rounds that are won by the most redoubtable thinker (according to audience vote), culminating in a grand prix winner appointed at the end of the day.

Big Creative Thinking

Steve Aldridge kicked off the opening round (Creative Thinking) with an appeal to break out of the ghetto of marketing communications with creative ideas which don't look like marketing. Steering clear of ambient as best he could, he suggested that identifying the natural voice of a brand and fusing it in a relevant way with the communications channel generates creative ideas that would be more impactful and better received by audiences jaded with a surfeit of predictable communications ideas. He backed this up with a host of creative examples. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of these were ads, since one of the conventions of advertising is that it is supposed to look like advertising - or at least shouldn't be confused with editorial.

Next up was Graham Fink, who followed by recruiting us into a club of Big Thinkers that he would set up if he won. The key to big thinking, he said, is opposite thinking - and the way to get this is to bring together people who work in very different areas from each other.  Then, with a flourish, Graham asked us all to open up an envelope on our seats - for each to find our personal doppelganger. The Club is to be launched online - and we were asked to give a single hour of our time to a meeting.  And with 15 minutes up, Graham swept from the canvassing stump.

Fernando Roma of JWT followed. Maybe intimidated by the heavyweights who preceded her, she flattered her audience by giving a Brazilian perspective on how weird and brilliant Britain and the British are. For her, piracy is our great export - and Francis Drake an archetypal pirate.  Personally I thought we were supposed to be rather apologetic about our inglorious history of colonizing and robbing other colonizers. With this splendidly politically incorrect argument, Fernando jammed her foot firmly in the door.

Then it was left to Dave Trott to recommend a new burst of predatory thinking. There is no new ground to be won, he warned - in a recession, if you want to win, you have to take from someone else. His great list of examples was sterling stuff, but not enough to head off the people's tribune, Graham Fink, who took the first round.

Big Research Thinking

Opening the research round (which oddly only had one research professional speaking) was Les Binet, the most decorated IPA effectiveness winner. He delivered substantively the same presentation as he had at the WARC Advertising Research conference in September (see the "Slipping Through My Fingers" section of the blog I wrote on that), where he summarised the learnings from over three decades of advertising effectiveness awards. Binet is a controversialist. He closed with a lovely cuff to the side of the head, by revealing that campaigns which had been pre-tested did less well than campaigns which hadn't. This is not to say that measurement is not important - clearly all had been extensively evaluated - but that pre-testing is not the panacea than many clients evidently think it is.

Tim Britten of Yougov followed. He laid into research (actually more than his non research co-combatants did) for not being very good a lot of the time. And he made a plea of running online research communities, and qualitative to quantitative surveys, where you could ask simple questions because, having recruited a panel, you already knew the context so didn't have to repeat or duplicate wearisome ground establishing questions.

Mandy Pooler of Kantar closed the round by claiming that research was the emerging sex,drugs & rock & roll of the comms world, mainly because the internet was allowing us to capture so much data about people's ordinary lives. After all, it was only last week that Sir Martin Sorrell dropped a billion on TNS! All the new ideas will come from research, she said, throwing an example of each of these ideas at clients, media people, creatives and planners. And claimed the backlash against research was starting because privacy was impossible. To paraphrase Peter Kaye - like garlic bread, (I've tasted it) research is the future.   But Les Binet took the round notwithstanding.

Big PR Thinking

Round 3 marked the first time there had been a round about PR. That was interesting, because PR has been the part of the communications mix where planning has made the least impact. So what big thinking would three leading PR professionals bring to the party? 

Mark Borkowski, proprietor of the eponymous PR agency, began by showcasing a series of gadgets, including clitoris allsorts and a flying f*** which really flew - at least it was supposed to.  His point was that these objects needed a story before they became relevant - and that is what PR delivers. Stories are much more important than ideas, he argued, because they make products and ideas usable by audiences. Storytelling is more than fiction - it has to reveal a truth in the company or product.  This seemed a clear introduction to PR - and showed how PR was different from other communications. How big a piece of thinking this was would depend on the other PR speakers.

Paul Melody of Freud Communications followed and confessed he had decided to rip up his presentation the day before and to begin again. What he gave us was a dense overview of how Barack Obama had used PR to win the presidential election and how the BBC in Sachsgate had shown how to lose ground and annoy people.  The key was balancing how to react and how to respond.  By failing to respond to the seriousness of Ross and Brand's antics and then overreacting, the BBC had shown they didn't understand how the mass audience had started to actively participate in opinion forming. After the inflammatory comments of Jeremiah Wright, Obama reacted as a human being (he wouldn't disown his pastor) by responding in a considered way (he disagreed with him).  Obama had demonstrated how to communicate with an audience of mass participation. This was open source thinking. He closed by saying that the citizen had replaced the customer as the audience, and from now on we had to engage with everybody.

Angie Moxham of 3 Monkeys concluded the session. She said that most people don't get PR, which is about creating  waves of information as they travel through the population. The best metaphor for describing this is quantum mechanics, where the particles of your story dance only when observed by an audience.  So it was back to storytelling again, only this time riding the quantum wave. She proposed inverting the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), although from the average age of the audience I would have been surprised if anyone knew what it was, or much less used it.  But Angie took the second round.

Big Marketing Thinking

Next up were the clients in the marketing round, opened by Ian Armstrong of Honda and his plea for more neuroscience - to treat the human brain as a predicting machine. He covered a lot of ground in a short time. Using a methodology developed by the Newcomen group, he showed how you can monitor dopamine levels to show to what extent an experience has matched your expectations. Effective customer communications is about convergent thinking - giving people what they expect.  The new way of thinking is heterogenous - spotting new patterns and asking people was that what I was expecting?  It's fair to say that Armstrong dazzled rather than conveyed exactly what dopamine would do for the aspiring neuromarketer, but he held our attention.

Clare Marshall of Boots pulled us back to the nitty gritty, by arguing that the biggest thinking is how to have a really good trading Christmas (don't you love retailers' refusal to get distracted?)  To take people with you, you need to find ways to inspire them - ways which are relevant to the brand.  Brands such as Nike, Walmart and Google do this, and by doing more than trading.   What followed felt like an internal brand presentation to Boots staff about the power Boots has to help people live healthier lives. Mike Hoban of Scottish Widows was billed to speak, but couldn't make it.  Ian Armstrong took the round and then all took lunch.

Big Planning Thinking

The planning round is typically one of the toughest, with speakers facing their hard-to-impress peer group. David Bain borrowed the current meme around Brand Bubble, the title just published by Y&R. Brands as measured by customers, he told us, aren't rated as highly as they are by financial analysts. So there's a crunch coming. The solution is for brands to reconnect and to practice some humility. If you want to engage, then be engaging. Get the scale right. Bain was counting on not too many of his audience having read the book (which has only been out for a fortnight). A smart move.

Nicki Crumpton followed with the notion that rather than being ideas agencies, advertising agencies should focus on being agents of ideas.  No one owns the ideas, she contended, and we shouldn't try. Ideas are now open source - the most effective agencies will select the ideas and shape them so they travel the furthest.  The paradox of the agency business was being a "closed source industry in an open source world" - a very memorable quote.

But what she didn't answer was how open source agents get paid. This gives rise to the paranoia of the 'not invented here' attitude, because we perceive that the client won't pay for an idea which they might have identified themselves if they had the time or the inspiration. So we have to make the ideas or pretend we have. The new role of agencies, I think, is to be connectors. We don't need to add any more data - the world is already awash with it. The skill should be connecting the bits of knowledge together.  We should be paid for the usability of our ideas, not for executing them. Project management - how we make ideas travel - is the critical skill which needs to be at top table.

David Hackworthy closed the session with an argument built on genetics. There is too much cloning going on, he said. Creatives are trying to perpetuate themselves, when what they need to be doing is mutating ideas to breed new species. What we need are original mutations - which are true to the genotype of the brand. Phenotypes aren't where mutation properly happens.  He finished with the challenge - are you evolving or cloning? How are you evolving? Are your ideas evolutionary or derivative?  The audience who by now had demonstrated its grasp of quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology took him at his word. He won the round.

Big Communications Thinking

We went straight on into communications planning. Andy Stevens of Goodstuff warned of the dangers of internet communities - it is easy to join social media communities, he said, and just as easy to leave them - so we need to create hyperlinked citizen brands who have a sense of the local. There is a consumer backlash against global corporatism. People want to feel grounded. He predicted that regional media would take over from national media, given all the international newsfeeds available to regional and local press. Somehow, though, I don't see the Guardian going back to Manchester.

Jez Groom roared out of his corner with his favourite top 5 biochemical reactions of all time.  Most of what he had to say related to the chicken and the egg, or nature and nurture as he preferred to put it. Theorists lined up on the side of either the chicken or the egg. What all had missed was the nest - the power of context - and this was where planning needed to go. This is the age of expression where what you say only has validity because of the context in which you say it. He described himself as a context specialist working alongside content specialists. 

Jason Gonsalves at BBH took up Quantum theory - our second quantum outing of the day. Identity can be discreet or continuous, he revealed. Its about what brands are seen to do, not what they say about themselves.  The new model for communications is managing uncertaintly. Quite why a subatomic physical science model is more relevant to communications than a special or indeed general theory of relativity was never explained.  But clearly our quantum speakers had it because like, Angie Moxham, Jason won his round.

Big Publishing Thinking

David Hepworth of Development Hell opened the final round by giving an introduction to the world of magazine publishing. He recommended aiming for enthusiasts who buy the product less for the content than the experience of reading it and being a part of it. He recommended the abolition of big thinking and an elevation of the power of small thinking - attending to the detail. This was a sterling start to the round.

What followed, however, took the contest to a different level. Nigel Newton, the founder of Bloomsbury - no small publisher - gave a zany presentation about the importance of instinct over analysis. What he put on the powerpoint screen were some key statistics about a peculiar individual called Lloyd. While Newton patiently repeated his point about instinct we were continually distracted by graphs about Lloyd which started strange and became more and more bizarre.  His pay off? Develop good instincts, trust them and follow them. Point made.

Simon Waldman from Guardian Media Group finished the day on an upbeat note. In the face of the doom and gloom of the recession, he chose to review how the UK media industry is becoming a global powerhouse exporting internet channels, programmes and programme formats all over the world.  He urged us to look overseas for growth. This is where the big opportunities are. It was a fine way to finish the afternoon.  But Nigel Newton took the round anyway.

Grand prix: the winner of winners

In the final showdown between the individual round winners, Graham Fink won the Big Thinker of the day award - and there wasn't much surprise about the result.  This is a contest about the ability to take an audience with you, not to impress them. So those who play tricks with the audience do better than those who set out to impress. 

Big Thinker winner: Graham Fink of M&C Saatchi

The Battle of Big Thinking is a good format but it needs more knockabout - maybe pecha kucha, which still works well as a live format - and maybe setting a topic at the last minute and having speakers spar against one another.  It is a huge pressure coming up with new thinking - actually the rate of new thinking isn't that high. So the danger is to dress up current thinking with a metaphor or abstract theory. This doesn't make thinking big - it makes it complicated. What I will keep from the day were the simple ideas. Big should be simple.