We're in a crazy economic situation right now and it's affecting our whole industry in good ways and bad. One thing that seems to be particularly worrisome to traditional agencies is the fact that many clients are moving to project-based relationships. This scares the crap out of the CFOs.

But it doesn't have to be a bad thing for your business. Project-based work presents some interesting opportunities -- actually, some totally awesome opportunities that you should be excited about. If you're getting more project work than AOR, you could try to turn one project into the next, building one on top of the other.

For instance, your ideas could have a part two and a part three, or sequels or added features or levels of engagement. It's pay as you (they) go.

It's a pretty natural evolution, when you're developing messages in real time, to build on project work over time until you suddenly have a large and robust campaign. It's also how most successful Internet developments occur. To me, this is a really interesting parallel that could influence our thinking.

If you look at brand marketing as a living entity that should reflect the behavior of a company and its current and future plans, then it should be a step-by-step process anyhow. No successful company on your roster developed overnight -- it was all done in increments.

This has always been true, of course, but this economic situation has made it even more so. Whereas before we could plan the whole year with the understanding that things would only need to be tweaked as circumstances warranted, these days the planning of the whole year is an increasingly dubious exercise; note how many companies have stopped forecasting revenues. The need to stay nimble has commensurately increased.

There's already an existing map for how to run your projects and company on a project-by-project basis. Software development -- particularly Web applications -- often works in an iterative way. There are several approaches, but they fall under an umbrella term: "agile development." It's more or less what it sounds like. You start with what you think is a good idea, and perform short bursts of work, planning for the most pressing needs. You check the response from the users, get their feedback, listen, evolve, change.



The alignment between agile development and the increased need for brands to be nimble is interesting. It's all about how things should work in the abstract anyhow -- and I'm sure it's how the best long-term relationships you have with your clients work.

So if you're doing more project-oriented work, get your head around how to work in an iterative way. It's not just your business that needs you to think like that-your client's business does, too. Plan for short sprints. Think about contracts that hire teams for these projects, not specific deliverables. Focus on the immediate objectives. Measure. Adapt. Repeat.

Another potentially positive side to panic and short-term goals is that clients might be more open to experimentation. In Silicon Valley there is a mantra: "Fail fast." Try something, find out if it's going to work and if it's not going to work, ditch it ASAP and move on to the next idea. It's why all the startup guys have a resume full of failed startups yet VCs still keep giving them money to try again. For the longest time it didn't really make sense to me, but it does now-even though they failed, they usually did a few things right. In most cases it's that the startup guys tried something new that seemed like a good idea, launched it as well as they could and failed quickly. Put in another quarter, try again.

The point here is that there's value in both trying a new thing and efficiently failing. Advertising can work like this. All campaigns don't need to be a success. Most of them aren't, actually. Usually when you see a campaign being mocked or maligned -- and the agency fired -- for a marketing failure, it failed slowly and expensively when it could have done so quickly and cheaply. If your process is more organic, you can check at multiple steps in the process and see what's working and what's not. You might be able to take a skittish client to bigger places and you'll likely end up with more successful work.

Benjamin Palmer is co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group. He can be reached at benjamin@barbariangroup.com.