FOREWORD

COMING UP WITH A GOOD IDEA is hard, but it’s not that hard. What’s harder is coming up with ideas on demand and on time. What’s really hard is bringing your ideas to smart, elegant life in the real world.

My guess is Mr. Edison wasn’t the first genius to look into the darkness and see the need for light, but creating a working light bulb—that was a world-changing achievement. It’s said that he and his team developed and studied more than 3,000 approaches before landing on one that worked. That’s 3,000 failures on the way to one success.

Advertising isn’t quite that brutal, but sometimes we talk about it as if it is. Like other businesses that aren’t nearly as macho as they pretend to be (Wall Street!), the ad business talks of war rooms, concepts that are killed, and bloody battles between creatives and suits.