Then the tractor came along and it didn't need to sleep or rest, and you had to have one because all of your competitors had them and you would fall behind if you didn't!
..so you had to work harder and longer to make enough stuff to sell to pay off your loans and the other new costs that having a tractor gave you.
…so then you had to work even harder to make even more to sell at a lower price to make the money – just to pay for the bloody tractor!!!
The moral of this lovely little tale is that this is what technology does to just about everything it touches and that, pretty much as soon as a new technology is introduced into a business process, the value of that industry falls through the floor while, at the same time, the effort required to keep in the game soars through the roof!
Technology is of course also changing the traditional processes and delivery outputs of everything that a marketing/advertising agency used to do and our challenge – nay, opportunity – is to recognise those bits of our business that are most useful to our clients but that have not yet had a 'tractor' introduced and to cleverly refocus our efforts into these areas as quickly as possible, since anything else is simply to stay on the death spiral downwards!
We think our future therefore is based on helping our clients work out what their future is, helping them get there and then helping them bring their customers with them.