Lee Clow- The Chairman and Global Director of TBWA\Worldwide, spoke for SHOOT's 50th year of publication in its year-end issue.Back around 1970 when Chiat\Day was starting up in Los Angeles, Lee Clow found himself working at N.W. Ayer and didn't enjoy the environment there. "It was too much about what was bad about the Mad Men days--martini lunches and keeping clients happy rather than striving to do something better and creative on their behalf," recalled Clow. "Meanwhile there was a lot of buzz about this shop across town on Olympic Boulevard [in L.A.] called Chiat/Day. Jay Chiat and Guy Day were there, Hy Yablonka was the creative director. It was a place I wanted to work. After bothering them for a year, I finally landed a job and I've been there ever since."
The "there" has changed quite a bit over the years, as reflected in Clow's current roles with Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide, and with TBWA\Media Arts Lab. Yet whatever titles he's carried over the years, Clow has always found himself trying to maintain a key working dynamic. "It was fun being 18 people on Olympic Boulevard," he related. "There was a passion and intensity in trying to figure out how to do new brave stuff. Jay Chiat pushed for breakthrough work. Today, we still aspire to do the same. But when you get as big as we are now, it gets harder to maintain the feel of what we had at Chiat\Day with those core people. That's the feel, though, that I still look to attain today, so that our creative brand groups feel and act like little agencies with the same kind of passion we had for one or two accounts back then."
Clow's creative passion has translated into such iconic work as Apple's historic "1984" Super Bowl spot, and years later the reunion between Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day which first yielded the lauded "Think different" campaign. That creative spirit now extends all the way through iPods, iPhones and the ongoing "Mac vs. PC" campaign which has become part of mainstream pop culture.
As for how agency creatives and their mandate have changed over the years, Clow observed, "Back in the day it used to be that the high threshold for a creative person was to do TV. Lower down the food chain there was print, and further down there were dealer ads. But today creative people and creative departments have to be part of an all-media thinking creative group. Creative is not just about a TV commercial.
"Today," continued Clow, "creatives have to consider what kind of conversations are going to start up around the idea they're putting out there for a brand no matter what the medium. You don't have control over conversations in social media, blogs, chats, on Facebook and Twitter. But you can do things as a brand, take actions that beget conversation, beget interest, that tap into the power of people wanting to spend time talking about you, your brand, what you do. We have never sought to seed or try to force conversation on the Internet. It's the brand that does that and the conversation is spontaneous. 'How do you like your iPhone?' The brand has to be smart, likeable and trustworthy. Everything a brand does is advertising.
"Ultimately," affirmed Clow, "brands are going to become media, with people choosing to seek out a certain brand and spend time with it. If the brand has done a film, people want to see it. They want to see their product, their store. The Apple Store is probably the best ad Apple has ever done. The store is an audio-video experience with passionate kids at the genius bar, an inviting design, interaction with the products, a theater in back where they teach and where other forms of film are shown that engage, inform, tell stories and sometimes entertain. Apple's packaging tells as much of a story about that brand as a TV spot. The experience of getting an iPhone, opening the box, how reverently that packaging is designed, the words and pictures taking a dimensional form on the package. People want to touch, feel and see a brand. Our task is to help build a brand that's strong enough as a medium so that people will want to interact with that brand's stories."
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-Article from Shoot Online Dec 11, 2009.
