I visited my parents this weekend. They live in a village in Warwickshire in the same house that I grew up in. With all our children and pets, we don't get out much so I hadn't been for a couple of years. Watching my kids play in the house where I grew up was rather nostalgic. It really struck me what had changed.

In summary:

I had.......... 3 TV channels to choose from with very little worth watching for kids, a box of toys ( subuteo being the big one ), a few books ( that I never looked at ), a garden, some fields with a football pitch and a wood...and everything was closed at the weekend.

They have....... 1000 TV channels and rising, dvd, sky +, home cinema, the internet, laptops, computer games, real books, digital books, more toys than you can count; things that bleep, flash, jump,fly...... the garden, the football pitch, a playground straight out of Startrek, a local farm that has now turned into a kind of rural Disneyland, an electric garage door, a jacuzzi bath plus lots of Grandma's strange ornaments to demolish.

What is interesting is that kids now have to develop a new skill that I didn't need ; the skill of deciding what to do from an ever expanding list of options. While I had to find stuff to do, they have the opposite problem...too much stuff and not enough time.

And that applies to all our lives. Technology, globalisation and a culture of choice means we all have to deal with the same problem..too much stuff and not enough time. And that is in essence why business and marketing have changed. We don't have to put up with things anymore, we don't have to make do. If we don't like a programme on TV we flick, if we don't like ads we can fast forward them, if we don't like shops we go to the internet or our kids school or the local hospital or anything else you care to choose from.If it doesn't do it for us we exercise our right to choice.

So brands need to wake up to this. To be accepted in people's busy, over-supplied lives we need to give people a good reason to be part of it. It's not good enough to just shout the same tired old sales messages from the roof-tops.

And don't believe that the solution is always the latest technology. In a short experiment this weekend (based on my kids) - demolishing Grandma's strange ornaments won, hands-down.