In this book, I’m hoping to impart some useful information about advertising ideas and how one arrives at them. I’m hoping this information will bring comfort and peace and a touch more confidence. Not to you, of course, because I know that you personally have no particular anxiety about your ability to produce great ideas on demand. No, the advice that follows has been prepared so that you might pass it on to some deserving friend or colleague or classmate. Perhaps you have someone in mind already. Perhaps it’s the young woman of your acquaintance, the one who is certain that she’s a hack, who knows that the two decent ads in her book were flukes that will not be repeated. Or maybe it’s the young man who studies old show annuals like the Torah because he privately knows he has no interesting ideas of his own. What I hope to do for these friends of yours is to persuade them that there are practical steps one can take to generate ideas that are good and maybe even great. I want them to understand that, yes, there is magic involved in creativity, but the magic is accessible to even the most discouraged among us, even if we’ve never won an award and don’t think we ever will.