Are You Ready for Failure?

As the old marketing models move aside, marketers need to increasingly put themselves at risk, on behalf of clients and on behalf of their agencies.

In Online Spin, Max Kalehoff makes a great point about the importance of embracing failure as well as success:

From a marketing standpoint, winning increasingly requires experimentation, risk-taking, and frequent failure. Rigid organizations that don’t build higher levels of unpredictability and periodic loss into their models will lose in the long run. They simply will fail to adapt and build new competencies necessary to stay competitive.

Being strategic sometimes means not being safe. A strategy can be desgined to embrace risk and the associated failures that may come. But through such risky ventures and ideas, better concepts and fresher approaches may be found. And when advermarketing is moving at the speed of light, last week's failure will lead to tomorrow's breakthrough idea.