You Sleep When You Die

During competitions, she uses what little vision she has to focus on someone who’s running right in front of her, and then just keeps running … unless that runner gives out. At that point she finds someone new to follow… Until she passes them, too.

Any creative process has to give you the freedom to come up with a wide range of ideas, some of which are going to suck. And no, it’s not a crime to come up with a bad idea. In fact, you usually need bad ideas if you’re going to get to the one great idea you need. But in an era when negative consumer and media feedback happens not in days or hours, but in minutes, you’ve got an obligation to test any idea well enough to protect your brand before you launch something embarrassing on consumers. Ben & Jerry’s didn’t do that.

Carter, who passed away Thursday, was a fierce competitor and a natural leader. His greatest joy in life was winning a baseball game. I remember watching him play during his prime and thinking that he was the toughest guy on either side of the field, both mentally and physically. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

The game may be over now, but the Super Bowl is still a hot topic, especially in our industry… On Monday, I shared my own answers with Tracy Byrnes of Fox Business Network. What are your thoughts?

“1984″ was the very first high-profile Super Bowl ad. It was an event in itself. Before this, the ads you saw during the Super Bowl were pretty much like all the other ads you saw during any other football game. Nobody tuned in to watch the ads; people tuned in to watch the game. But on Super Bowl Sunday, 1984, Steve Jobs, a master promoter, changed that. He got people to pay more attention to his ad than they did to the game! Along the way, he paid for a bigger production budget for a TV ad than anyone had ever seen … freaked out the Apple board of directors … and raised the bar for my entire industry.