Making Your Own Dreams Come True .

If you haven't noticed there is something a bit different about this website this week.

Yep. Instead of getting paid to create advertising, I'm getting paid to run advertising.

That was my original objective in beginning this column. That I could attract a big enough audience by throwing rocks at Madison Avenue that they would return the favor by throwing back money. And so I did.

There is something outrageously satisfying about setting a goal for yourself and somehow achieving it. We as creative people are eminently qualified to help our audience decide what goals they should set for themselves. We call it demand creation. And when it works, factories go into overtime and freight trains roll night and day.

But somehow we never quite get around to setting goals for ourselves. Of course I'm not talking about those standard upper middle class suburban goals of two Mercedes driveways and two point five kids away at Stanford. I'm talking about doing what we are so good at doing for our employers, for ourselves. Creating value from the ground up.

All it takes is a concept. One solid idea. That, and the understanding that an idea by itself is useless. It's what you do with the idea that counts. But what you do with the idea can take years and years. And tens of thousands of dollars. All with no guarantees of success. So what is it that keeps you going day after day, month after month, failure after failure? It's the dream. The very engine of innovation.

I started an agency. It crashed and burned. I started another agency. It did the same. I moved to L.A. Third agency was a charm. I retired a wealthy guy. Then the dot bomb crash wiped me out. Back to square one. But this time out, I had a different dream. This time out I didn't want to be dependent upon the kindness of clients. This time I wanted to BE the client. So in addition to starting another ad agency, I started creating products. A children's book. 32 websites. 17 television shows. 9 feature films. This time I took the time to learn from the best.

I learned about the film business from the producer of the Matrix. I learned about the television business from the producer of Survivor. I learned about the web by working on the Sun Microsystems account. But every step of the way I let my progress be driven by my dream. My dream determined which aspect of the 12 to 14 businesses I was running would be the best candidate for immediate interaction and which would be best left to their own devices.

Once that decision was reached all I had to do was to make sure that every day at least one component of one of the 12 to 14 businesses was accomplished. Since every aspect of all these businesses were interlocked it was not nearly as daunting as you might suspect. The hardest part was to break the tasks down into lists and figure out which ones needed to come first. I had no way of knowing which tasks would come last because so much depended upon the completion of the initial structures of the businesses at hand.

As I went through the drill I began to discover that many of the ideas were already being done. This eliminated some and caused me to combine others. At the end of the first year I was down to six solid business entities. By the end of year two I was down to three. Web Publishing, Web Communities and Television Programming.

As always my dream was intact. This week, two of the dreams became real. MadisonAvenew.com and BrAnswers.com were   both relaunched and launched.   MadAve now has advertisers and an audience, so that all I need to do is to spend more time promoting the brand to increase the audience. BrAnswers.com is now in alpha and VCs are lining up to see if it's worth the $12 million I'm asking for to build its infrastructure.   As luck would have it the WGA strike put us at the head of the line as Reality TV became the only game in town not covered by a Writer's Guild contract breakdown. So now "Family Secrets" is in test.

So there you have it. On one side, my advertising career. Chugging along smoothly with just the concerns of getting my billing out by the 15th. On the other hand, the dream. Now fully functional and ready to start making itself known to its own respective worlds.

Pay attention to your dreams. Listen to that little voice nagging away inside your head. If you do, sooner or later it will find its way into your wallet. If you don't you will only have yourself to blame.

Stay strong.

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