Views > final thoughts S Cuttlebutt Advertising
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Had a great time at the CatEx Direct Commerce Association’s Annual Summit last month where I seriously enjoyed catching up with many of the 150 or so delegates from member companies. Plenty going on in the sector from all accounts. Still pretty tough market conditions out there but that isn’t stopping businesses from exploring new opportunities, testing new media and working on new creative treatments.
The big enemy at the moment for a lot of people is time, or rather the severe shortage of it. For everyone that now has an active business Twitter account to manage plus their brand’s Facebook presence, it is all extra workload to add to that generated by the blog, the customer email marketing programme, the daily content posted to the website, and so on. The small business has to be agile to keep ahead of its larger competitors; has to engage with its customers; has to carry on convincing itself, its team and its financiers that it is doing all it can to make progress. So we asked, where
“So what gives when we reach the absolute overload of
two decades or more ago. But, thinking about it, perhaps we had the better deal because we got to launch, develop and run our businesses without these tools. We had more time to plot and plan and less “chatter” to distract our attention from the task in hand. Some of us recall the excitement caused by the arrival of the first fax machines that meant we could dispense with our reliance on couriers and save days’ delays when dealing with overseas suppliers or customers. Now every communication is near instantaneously delivered. A few remembered using the telex
communication?”
does the thinking and planning time have to come from now? Is there ever really any down time these days? Any me time? Any dedicated family time? Any opportunity, in fact, to simply switch off and relax? As a person whose best ideas invariably percolate whilst sleeping, my 3am eureka moment scribbles are the stuff of legend and always kept me ahead. But I am now aware that I am not alone. There is an army of people still working away and who fill my inbox overnight with individual emails— not broadcasts—sent in the small hours. I can only assume from this that an awful lot of people are now working 12 or more hour days with many regularly also working for part of every weekend. And that is just to keep on top of the everyday challenges. Yes, our small huddle agreed, we’d have been dangerous had we had all of these new comms channels at our disposal
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machine to send urgent orders to product and media suppliers. Actually back then, we didn’t know we were born. We wrote letters. We crafted direct mail packages. We wrote and printed internal memos for distribution. Our customers were perfectly satisfied if we delivered their orders within 28 days. Deliver within a week and they’d be ecstatic. They couldn’t call to complain, no-one issued customer service numbers, meaning that customers had to write in. So everything, every business day revolved around receipt of the post. What we didn’t do was copy everyone and their dog in on whatever we were doing; and nor did we demand others’ attention and time in the way everyone does now. So what gives when we are reaching this absolute overload of communication? You sit in a train carriage these days surrounded by people barking “I’m on the train” into their handsets and having what appear to be completely unnecessary, pointless conversations. And yes, you still get the Jonny-no-mates holding stupid, ridiculously loud, one-sided conversations with their phones. And yes, you still see these silly twerps turn crimson when the phones they’ve been pretending to use actually ring. For the commuters among our readers
there is at least plenty to distract them from the tedium of the journey these days, not least getting the supermarket delivery sorted or buying that new jacket online. But whereas once the journey time was used to read through reports, makes notes after meetings, write to do lists, or simply read, it seems now to be eaten up with the need to be seen to be communicating, no matter how futile that communication is. Where to next, we asked? Where indeed? Answers on a postcard please.
S-cuttlebutt@catalog-biz.com
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