The year ahead for ... production.(economic condition of advertising agencies)

Daniel Kleinman fears production companies could go to the wall as clients' demands for ever cheaper solutions reach unrealistic levels.

This time of year, many of us are gazing at our balls trying to discern what the upcoming year will bring, and it's certainly a hairy prospect for a lot of us.

Is it going to be a tough year for production? Well, yes, probably; is it the newspapers' ubiquitous cliche, the abyss? I hope not, but I'm not going to look downwards just in case. I'm gazing ahead and I see problems but also, in a 'half-empty, half-full' type way, a chance to be a bit radical.

Intuitively, of course, one would assume that as the market gets tougher for clients they should want to advertise more, meaning more production, but I think we know it doesn't work like that. Scripts are going to be fewer and further between, budgets will be tighter and probably some creative treatments will be more conservative.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the agencies with banks as clients come up with the goods; those creatives are certainly going to earn their money, if they can get any out of 'em.

We are going to be asked to 'think outside the box' more. It's a phrase that comes up a lot at the moment and it means this: what we have here is a difficult big-production film on a tight schedule but we only have half the money we had last year.

On the plus side, this could be a chance to be inventive, offer up solutions that are unusual or challenging, to be brave and do something different. On the minus side, it could mean we expect production companies to undercut each other and work longer and harder for less if they want the job.