Beneath this building, down an elevator shaft seven miles deep, is a vault containing a little spiral notebook filled with scribbles and doodles - Einstein's Theory of Creativity. It's the magical formula to guarantee success for any business.

In the old days it was classified Super-Duper-Top-Secret. Not even J. Edgar Hoover himself had access to it. But now that communism is all washed up and everybody's a capitalist it can finally be divulged.

Here it is: A=TS/M.

Pretty awesome, huh?

Spelling it out, it means Advertising (A) equals Time (T) multiplied by Space (S) divided by Money (M). Any quantum physicist could figure this out in a heartbeat. For mere mortals, here's what it means: if you buy some advertising time and/or space - enough of it to divide up all your money - your business will succeed.

Of course, it sounds simple, and everyone should be able to immediately put it to use and make obscene amounts of money. But scientists now believe that Einstein may have been distracted by the Home Shopping Network when he doodled this formula, because it has two major flaws.

First, Einstein didn't specify how MUCH money you needed. As everyone in the expanding universe knows, money isn't relative - you either have it or you don't. So a lot of people have spent all their money buying advertising, only to learn that it wasn't enough. Which brings us to Einstein's second mistake: Creativity.

He forgot to include it in his formula for business success. Unlike money, time and space ARE relative. So if you spend all your money buying advertising time and space that nobody see or hears, you'll wind up in the poor house - relatively speaking.

The average American consumer encounters almost 2,000 advertisements every day! Of those, the consumer will notice about 80; remember about a dozen; and act on only two. Two out of two thousand! Those two are probably the only two that caught the consumer's attention.

Attention-getting ads are not necessarily those that shout out in an obnoxious way. That kind of advertising gets the wrong kind of attention --the consumer remembers to never shop that business!

Advertisers constantly search for new and creative ways to capture the consumer's attention. Here's a tip you can take to the bank: keep it simple, keep it honest and keep doing it.

The old stuff still works - words like FREE and NEW and BETTER. Communicate the consumer benefit - what does your business do that will make your customer's life better? And keep doing it (advertising, that is). You have to be there with your message when your customer needs you, or they'll go to someone else.

So put on your thinking cap and unleash the creative genius within you. Then watch your advertising effectiveness take a quantum leap into the universe of success!

This article first appeared in 1992 as part of the syndicated series, All About Advertising.