Goldiblox

If you paid extra close attention to the commercials during the 2014 Super Bowl, you'd have seen a genuinely history-making 30 second spot amid the annual cavalcade of supermodel breasts and beer-drinking bros. Toy startup GoldieBlox, which makes construction and engineering kits for little girls, had the distinction of being the first small business to air an ad during the Super Bowl. The ad campaign, which I originally conceived and created for social media,  beat out more than 150,000 rivals in a contest run by Intuit that was ultimately decided by a public vote. The airtime for the 30-second spot - shot for $7k - was worth an estimated $4M and was seen by a record 111.5 million viewers.

The campaign caused GoldiBlox to completely sell out of all of its products and took the company from online retail to Toys 'R' Us and Target in less than a year. GoldiBlox is now available in more than 1,000 retail locations across the country.