The Big Idea Had a Good Run. Time Killed It
The Big Idea used to carry a brand for months, sometimes years. One headline. One spot. One story to hold it all together. That was fine when time moved slower. When a TV ad had room to breathe. When print stuck around. When media didn’t talk back.
Now? AI speeds everything up. Formats are fractured. Audiences move fast and forget even faster.
Relevance isn’t a win. It’s the baseline. Big ideas break under pressure now. They don’t bend. They flame out. And vanish.
So why is the industry still chasing the one perfect idea when the world it was built for doesn’t exist anymore?
What Works Now
The real power isn’t in one big idea. It’s in what surrounds it. How it moves. How it changes. How it gets picked up, pulled apart and put back together again.
Small, sharp, modular ideas win. They’re built to evolve. To travel. To grow.
That’s not a loss for creativity. It’s a reset.
We’re finally free from choosing between brand and performance. The best ideas now do both. They connect. They convert. They stick. And they spread.
Here’s the shift:
- From campaigns to systems
- From moments to momentum
- From one big swing to constant motion
Structure isn’t the enemy. It’s the multiplier. And real creativity knows how to use it.
Super Bowl Ads Die on Monday
Every year, brands spend $8 million on a single spot, hoping for magic. Hoping for a moment.
But if there’s no system behind it, no next step, no way in, no reason to come back, it's just an expensive Monday morning hangover.
For example, Meta no longer runs campaigns; it’s running a machine. AI writes the copy, designs the layout, chooses the image and watches the results.
In that world, the Big Idea doesn’t stand a chance. Creative isn’t about the one great line anymore. It’s about the 10,000 variations that get smarter by the minute.
And now? Every major holding company is scrambling to catch up, building their own AI content engines, plugging into platforms and promising clients they can do the same.
But you can’t bolt a system onto an old model and call it innovation. This isn’t about tools. It’s about thinking differently from the ground up.
The Big Idea didn’t fail. Time moved on. We should too. Not bigger. Smarter.
Ideas that move. Ideas that learn. Ideas that last.
Craig Elimeliah is chief creative officer at Code and Theory.
