Ted Royer, Co-Founder and Creative Lead at Folk Devils, asks: What happens when technology weakens the traditional relationship between time and value?Zach gained low-level advertising fame for the wrong reason.
In an anecdote that has circulated in agency circles for years, Zach was taking multiple freelance assignments simultaneously, collecting day rates from different agencies while allowing each to believe they had purchased his full day. Eventually someone from one agency called Zach at another agency, and all his gigs unraveled. Zach’s story spread, as stories tend to do in an industry that puts almost as much energy into gossip as it does it’s creative.
The anger aimed at Zach was ethics-based. He had broken the rules ands violated trust. His day was one agency’s day and no one else’s.
Once that subsided, another, more uncomfortable question emerged. If Zach could complete the work he had been hired to do in much less than the pre-arranged day, what exactly had the agency purchased? His actual day? His output? His expertise? His physical presence?
At the time, those questions felt moot: day rates were the norm. Today they are much closer to home.
For most of the modern economy, professional services businesses have been built around a fairly simple assumption: expertise takes time. Agencies, consultants, lawyers, accountants, and countless other knowledge workers have spent decades pricing their services according to the hours required to produce a result. Time became the common unit of business because it was measurable and predictable. The value was mentally measurable. Clients understood it. Firms understood it. Entire operating models were built around it.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself in conversations with agency leaders, consultants, and operators who are all wrestling with some version of the time problem. The details vary by industry, but the underlying tension feels remarkably similar: Technology is allowing people to do certain kinds of work much faster than they could a few years ago, yet many of the systems used to value that work aren’t keeping pace.
The discussion usually gets framed as an artificial intelligence story. That’s understandable. AI is the technology attracting most of the attention, and in some cases the attention is deserved. Who hasn’t built a deck in minutes using Claude that used to take two days? AI is another conversation, what we’re talking about here is the assumption sitting underneath business.
Advertising provides a useful example because it has always had a complicated relationship with time, and it’s always been creative in finding solutions.
Anyone who has spent enough years in agencies knows that great ideas do not arrive on any schedule. A strategist can spend a week researching a problem and still struggle with the insight. Someone else can make an observation during a client meeting that changes the direction of a campaign. Timesheets get doctored and fluffed. A creative can stare at the wall for days and get nothing. OR an idea can come immediately, almost too fast, to seem worthy. (First thoughts get mocked as shallow, but sometimes they’re great.)
Value has never fit neatly inside a set number of hours, yet so many of us have to behave as though it does.
Last summer Scott Galloway famously said “WPP is our of business, they just don’t know it yet. Besides the rage-bait part of that statement, I instantly assumed he was talking about their hourly model. (I hear they have shifted to outcome-based models btw, let’s never count out the survival instincts of ad people.)
As they should. Time constraints are being blown apart. Research, production, development, analysis, and execution are all becoming more efficient in different ways. Some of those gains come from AI. Some come from software. Some come from workflows that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.
Whatever the source, outcomes are arriving at wildly different paces. The relationship between effort and value is becoming harder to measure through time alone.
A friend in private equity recently described how smaller teams inside portfolio companies are accomplishing work that used to require significantly larger groups. I’ve personally worked on two AI law brands that seek to upend the hourly model: they’re target is specifically law firm hours. (I know one layer who charges $3,000 an hour. That’s .83 cents a second. If he scratches his chin, it costs a client over a dollar.)
Of course, predictions about the future of work have a poor track record. I love reading about failed business predictions. Every generation tends to overestimate how quickly change arrives and underestimate how deeply it settles in once it does. Segways were going to change cities. Microsoft thought the iPhone would bomb. Movie theaters were supposed to die long ago, but theaters showing Obsession are packed.
Still, the question is urgent: how should expertise in any given situation be valued?
For agencies, this has implications that touch staffing models, client expectations, talent structures, and the way growth itself is defined. Growth used to mean adding people. More clients led to more headcount, which led to more billable hours. That path is no longer the only one available.
Some of the most effective teams I encounter today are surprisingly small. They move quickly, rely heavily on specialized expertise, and spend far less time thinking about padding activity than outcomes. And they charge by the project scope, not hours. Clients don’t seem particularly interested in how many people touched a project. They care whether the project is delivered fast and if it works.
Tech will always get better. New tools will continue to arrive as they seem to now almost every day. Entire categories of work will change and are changing. Those developments are secondary to a larger question about how knowledge work determines it’s real value.
Time itself was the reasonable mechanism. But time is running out.
