My friend Gina Caruso teaches advertising at Boston College. She asked me for "a quick creative brainstorm that I can activate during class." So I made this up. Not really sure if it works, but I'm curious what you think. Maybe Roger von Oech offers something similar.

Let's have fun with social engineering (or hacking), and apply it to advertising. I call this assignment, "Getting  To Know You." It's a two-part effort.

First:  Conduct a "2-minute dating" exercise -- everyone in the class has to sit down with everyone else in the class for 2 minutes. (So if there are 12 people in the class, this will take 22 minutes.) Each person has 60 seconds to question the other person, then roles are reversed. For the first 60 seconds, Person A is the Interviewer and Person B is the Subject. Then they switch roles...and move on.

The goal of the interview is to learn at least one salient fact about the Subject that can't be determined by physical appearance or general public knowledge. (This represents Demographics.) For example, an Interviewer might discover that their Subject is allergic to olives, or has never traveled outside the U.S. Write this down!

Second:  Grab a magazine (or your portfolio), and find your favorite print ad. Quickly figure out a way to revise your favorite ad so it speaks specifically to each of your other 11 classmates, based on the salient facts you've uncovered. You're going to make a distinct revision for each classmates. So, 11 classmates equals 11 revisions to the ad. But you only get 2 minutes per revision.

Finally:  An hour later (give or take), each student stands up, shows their favorite ad as reference, then quickly runs down the list of how they'd alter the ad for each of their classmates.

This last part demonstrates data-targeting, as practiced by environments like Facebook. As media and the Internet learns more and more about each of us (because we're constantly providing the information via blogs, Facebook status updates, etc.), advertising can become much more "tuned" to each of us specifically.