About the Author

Jack Foster was eighteen years old and working in an insurance company with about 150 other people when he got the idea to raffle off his weekly paycheck. Fifty cents a chance to win $27.50.

The first week he made a profit of $6.

The next week he had collected $53 dollars for the raffle when his boss found out what he was doing. He ordered Jack to return the money.

Then he fired him.

Ever since, Jack’s been trying to come up with ideas that wouldn’t get him fired.

Mostly he’s succeeded.

He lucked into the advertising business fifty years ago as a writer and has been coming up with ideas ever since. Ideas for scores of companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, ARCO, First Interstate Bank, Albertson’s, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Denny’s, Universal Studios, Northrup, Hughes, Disney, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear.

During the fifteen years Jack spent as the executive creative director of Foote, Cone & Belding in Los Angeles, it grew to be the largest advertising agency on the West Coast. He also has won dozens of advertising awards, including being named “Creative Person of the Year” by the Los Angeles Creative Club.

For seven years he helped teach an advanced advertising class at the University of Southern California that was sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and for three years he helped teach an extension class at the University of California at Los Angeles on creating advertising.

Jack married Nancy (“The best idea,” he says, “I ever had.”) forty-nine years ago. They live in Santa Barbara.