Kauffman asks: Will it be you?

The best ad of Super Bowl 2012 didn‘t run during the Super Bowl, but before it. And it wasn’t selling a product, but a vision — or rather, an economic philosophy.

I was not the only one who loved the Kauffman Foundation’s ad “Will it be you?” The vision of the ad is: America’s economic growth comes from entrepreneurs who take a good idea into a new business and new jobs.

Latest in the “Kauffman Sketchbook” series, the ad was visually catchy , professional, and used every one of its 30 seconds to make these key points.

Unfortunately, the traffic crashed their new website, Willitbeyou.com. Let’s hope the viewers followed up when the website came back up.

The other missed opportunity was doing more to get this message in front of young people. The ideal partner for this effort is Junior Achievement, which has a network of some 400,000 volunteers teaching capitalism to America’s children in schools all over the country

Kauffman has partnered with JA in the past. However, the visibility of this message today among parents — and some teens and pre-teens — should be followed up with a special push to make this message more real (and salient) for our next generation of potential entrepreneurs.