The BIG Idea is Dead - What the World Needs is Modern Ideas.

I was brought up in the world of “the BIG idea”(along with everyone else for the past 40 years)

Big beautiful things that screamed commitment, conviction and confidence; a wrapper that helped clients and their agency partners communicate new news, bold new directions of travel for brands at scale, or just a proper bit of repositioning (amongst many many other things).

And if you were lucky, they were launched into the world with big shiny long-form films, awesome out-of-home, fabulous press ads, radio, stunts, digital stuff and the odd bit of content to showcase further depth.

But the delivery of the ‘big idea’ has been dead-on-arrival for years now.

We’ve moved on. Conditions have changed. The kids are doing stuff different.

In a world that’s more impatient, more personalised and less predictable than it’s ever been, we need ideas that can not only navigate but thrive in this evolving tapestry of media options, memes and rapidly morphing cultural landscapes.

Enter stage left (theatres are still a thing right?) - MODERN ideas.

Modern Ideas dance with the world as it turns, rather than waiting for a grand unveiling. In the tsunami of content we consume each day these fabulous ideas, execute quickly, broadly and with fluidity.

As beautiful as they are, a set of horses on a wave is not something that executes well in 6” pre-rolls or TikToks, but “Good things come to those who wait” does. It’s not realistic to go into post productions for 3 weeks to make a pre-roll, we need something built for today and tomorrow.

Modern ideas are; ‘Flexible’ - which means that they show up natively in each media channel - e.g. Social / PR / Web team),Modern Ideas are ‘Attributable’ - in that they are unmistakably recognised as being for the brand they’re communicating for (often leveraging underused brand assets) and Modern ideas are ‘Reactive’ (able to adapt with the changing needs of clients and their world as it evolves. But none of this means anything without people actually seeing or talking about this stuff so the final F to our future-ready ideas is ‘Fame’. At Modern Citizens we refer to these wonderful things as “Famous ideas that go F.A.R” (see what we did there).

Don’t panic, the vital acts of craft, care and consideration are still imperative if we want people to actually notice what we’re saying, but the way in which these pieces of expertise engage the world around us has changed beyond recognition.

Modern Ideas are marvellous, entertaining, rich pieces of magic that our brilliant industry needs to create to thrive. These ideas will obviously still move people, and will still include gorgeous two minute cinema spots, posters and press ads, but they’ll also be capable of creating lightning quick content, conjuring up smart bits of customer experience, designing seamless websites, and build booking portals that aren’t just generic rectangles on a page.

This is where the leaders of Creatively driven companies like Modern Citizens now have a huge opportunity. Those of us with the bigger sand boxes to play in, will thrive. High functioning teams made up of world-class digital builders, socially-native creatives, prompt engineers and performance marketing people (to name but a few) will not just help us realise our creative ambitions but also successfully ride the wave of rapid change that we (and our clients) are all currently navigating.

It’s something we’ve been doing here at ModernCitizens for a while now.

Sure, the way in which we work is now dramatically different to the old days of the big idea, with less procrastination, waffle and lunch-wine, but it's new, it's exciting and it's fit for the modern world.

With Modern Citizens our style of ambitious Creativity has truly found an exciting place to play and by structuring Modern Citizens in our unique modular way (more on that later) we’re now able to deliver these Modern ideas at scale. 

With our Modular structure, we have discreet teams(modules) of citizens who are best in class at what they do, who are able to seamlessly come together with others to deliver exactly what our clients need, as the world bucks and bends around them.

After all a client’s problem or goal can change in the blink of an Ai.

So when we sit down with a client to figure out how to help our clients we gather the brilliant citizens we have in the irrespective disciplines together and work together to figure out how the idea we have can deliver everything it needs to, brilliantly in those spaces, all with Creative height - after all, who said a website had to be boring ?

So, next time you hear someone carping on about the shitty state of creativity. Eulogising about how ‘things used to be better”, how “we don’t make ads like we used to” (or other outdated negative missives) -gently guide them towards the light, show them what Ai can do to accelerate/augment/compliment the quality of their execution (NOT REPLACE) and remind them that things won’t go back to the way they were.

The rise of the Modern Idea is an exciting opportunity for us to show up in more ways, use our world class creativity in new and exciting ways to change behaviour and move people in a way that the modern world will respect.

The future isn’t going to stop changing, so being part of a group of people that’s capable of showing up in people's lives in exciting, disruptive and memorable ways, at pace, is hugely exciting.

Now gather round Citizens, let’s see what we can build, the future is modern.