Idea Pioneer

I suppose it must be well over ten years ago now that Saatchi & Saatchi stopped being an advertising agency and became The Ideas Company. Looking back, I think it was all a symptom of those i-words that became terribly "in" some time in the 1990s. I've already had a go about Icons recently and I'm sure that I must dragged Insights out for a dust-down somewhere in this blog. I was Queen of Insights for a brief but glorious spell at Saatchis. And I suppose that I should look at Innovation in a future piece.



Going back to Ideas, the life of a freelancer can be a trifle lonely at times and you don't always get the strokes and feedback that you need on those days when you feel that your ideas are losing their sparkle. So, for anyone who is feeling that way, I would recommend a look at The Economist's Ideas People site. This is, of course, nothing more than a glorified media selling tool. In the old days, media owners used to produce glossy brochures telling us how stinking rich their readers were. This is a little more subtle. We find out that They (the Ideas People aka Economist Readers) don't live in our world; we live in Theirs. And Ours (rather a lot of possessive pronouns going on here...) is the age of Innovation...Ideas are the currency of the modern economy. Entire new industries and many existing ones have turned from creating products to producing ideas...



Hmm. You may think this a touch disrespectful to all those wonderful inventors and discoverers of bygone years and wonder if you really would rather be "producing" than "creating" but, letting that pass, you probably are really burning to know if you could, perhaps, actually be an Ideas Person.



There's a handy little quiz on the site for just that purpose. I am proud to announce that I am a Pioneer. The sort of person who is always seeking new and interesting ideas and is fascinated by the world. A Pioneer tends to be a big thinker and Ideas People are the stars of the 21st Century. Well, that's a relief. That person who spends too long reading trashy gossip news sites and doing mindless quizzes on Facebook obviously has absolutely no connection with the real me whatsoever.