Ad Icon: David Lubars

Keeping things simple in a complicated world is just one of the bite-sized nuggets that has helped David Lubars, CCO BBDO Worldwide and chairman BBDO North America, achieve a boutique feel at the global agency. Sarah Shearman finds a restless mind focussed on being the ideas chef, cooking up creative for for clients, rather than being the waiter taking their orders

When David Lubars returned to BBDO 10 years ago as chairman and chief creative officer of North America, all industry eyes were on how this seasoned change-maker, with a reputation for breaking new ground in advertising, would transform an agency that had earned a reputation as a TV powerhouse.

From day one, Lubars had a vision to build a “21st century version of a kick-ass 60s agency, blowing minds with creative thinking and fresh ideas”. He envisioned BBDO New York as an oasis on Manhattan Island, where creative minds, who “weren’t invited,” could come and try new things.

A decade on under Lubars’ creative stewardship and BBDO has enjoyed a constant stream of acclaimed work from a client roster of category leading brands and has won every award going including multiple ‘agency of the year’ titles. But his original vision – made before a fictional account of a 60s New York ad agency became popular viewing – remains intact.

Lubars’ corner office, overlooking New York’s famous Radio City Hall, high above the over-crowded streets of Manhattan’s Midtown neighbourhood, has a somewhat serene, oasis-like feel to it. And looking at the dozens of awards lining its windowsills, it is easy to assume that Lubars has achieved everything he set out to do.

But Lubars is not one to rest on his laurels. A self-confessed “ADD-type”, he is never satisfied and is always looking for the next change. He comes across as an intense and passionate man who speaks with great conviction about his views on the industry, but not always at ease with talking about his own personal accomplishments. “In many ways I still feel like I did when I was 24,” he says. “I can always hear the footsteps behind me.”

However, his “healthy paranoia”, as he calls it, has been the driving force behind his career success to date. Lubars, who grew up in Brooklyn, followed his father’s footsteps into advertising. “He would sit me on the floor of his office with a pad and paper and I thought that seemed like a cool way to spend the day.”

After a brief six-month stint at the now defunct Boston agency Cabot, he landed a job as a copywriter at Leonard Monahan Saabye in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1982. Three years later he moved out West, joining TBWAChiatDay LA as group head.

In 1988 Lubars returned to the renamed Leonard Monahan Lubars & Kelly as partner. He left a few years before it folded to join BBDO West as CCO in 1993, later becoming the agency’s CEO.

Leaving the BBDO family to join Fallon in Minneapolis in 1998, as chief creative officer and later worldwide president, “worked out for the best” and prepared him for his current role. “It was such a fantastic place; I was young and they took a risk on me. It was really creative and had real heft to it – and the problems they had there were similar to here,” he says.

Of course, BBDO was a much bigger beast, and when Lubars rejoined in 2004 the agency was slow and process-oriented. Working with big clients on a larger stage is what excited him. Like many other leaders across the network, Lubars held on to his “boutique mentality” and, as such, he believes it is the only big agency that can truly call itself a “global boutique”.

“That sounds soundbitey and bullshit, but it is not. If you look at BBDO around the world, you have a lot of people doing very interesting and breakthrough things and going into uncharted terrain for big clients, which is a rare combination,” he says.

But maintaining a large-scale boutique, nimble enough to produce bleeding-edge work for category leading clients is not easy, says Lubars, whose remit expanded last year to worldwide CCO in addition to chairman of BBDO North America. Breaking down silos within the agency and cultivating a collaborative environment where “happy accidents” happen and “brains spark against each other” has been a key initiative of his.

The idea for the Snickers campaign You’re Not You When You’re Hungry, was born from this collaborative approach. By using insights from the research team that the Mars owned-chocolate bar provides an energy boost in between meals, the creative team was able to develop the popular tagline. The first ad, featuring actor Betty White behaving erratically in an American football game until she eats a Snickers bar, launched during the 2010 Super Bowl. Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli and Joe Pesci are among celebrities to have since starred in the ads. The campaign spread to 80 countries, spawned several regional versions of the campaign, including one by AMV BBDO in the UK featuring Joan Collins, as well as wackier internet memes, such as a version with a fake Kim Jong-Un.

Breaking down silos has meant knocking down walls at BBDO’s New York office. Renovations to make the space open plan finished at the end of 2012. The stripped back concrete of the office interior creates a warehouse feel that you might expect from a creative shop in Brooklyn, not one that shares a grandiose building with the bank UBS, taking up three floors of an entire block. The agency’s bar, which resembles a windowless New York dive bar, pays homage to its 60s roots with the name Central Filing, which was a code name for what the men drinking late at the agency would tell their wives they were doing.

“People who thrive here don’t need an assembly-line order,” says Lubars. He describes BBDO New York as a “young place” where people are open to new things. As such, he hires “an unfair share” of the “limited pool” of talent across a range of disciplines, often from outside the realm of traditional advertising. “I am unthreatened by new things and see them as an opportunity for the client. There is no room arch traditionalism in this industry,” he says.

Lubars also believes hiring the right personalities ultimately benefits the client. “Our culture of collaboration and liking each other is an amazing asset. If you spend three or four hours a week worrying about office politics, that is three or four hours a week you didn’t do client work,” he says. He also prefers his staff to share his healthy paranoia trait. “If I had to choose between unhealthy paranoia and no paranoia, I would prefer unhealthy paranoia,” he says.

Lubars, who prefers not to spend all of his time on a plane, sees his role in the agency as the one who keeps stirring the cement so it doesn’t set. “There is some messiness and chaos to that.”

One thing that is set in stone is the BBDO slogan, ‘The Work, The Work, The Work’, installed by its late chairman Phil Dusenberry. Keeping the agency’s focus on the work amid constant change and industry disruption boils down to great storytelling, Lubars explains. Quoting French director Jean-Luc Goddard, Lubars (who incidentally watches French New Wave films while running on the treadmill) says, “sometimes reality is too complex – stories give it form.”

“People have responded to storytelling from the beginning of time. The Bible, Shakespeare, Quentin Tarantino, True Detective – it is all great storytelling. That will never change.

“Storytelling is timeless, but what is timely is how you tell the story and deliver it.”

Perhaps one of the most recognised pieces of timeless storytelling from Lubars’ oeuvre – if not the entire industry – is BMW Films. The campaign, created out of Fallon, consists of a series of online shorts made by various Hollywood directors. It was considered so groundbreaking that the Cannes International Advertising Festival created a new category for it in 2003 – the Titanium Lion. At a time when TV dominated and online was known as ‘new media’, launching a digital-first exploration into branded content was truly pioneering.

While the BMW work, which is part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, earned Lubars his stripes as a non-traditionalist, he by no means thinks TV is dead. “We are in the golden age of TV. There are now so many good shows you can’t even watch them all – it is really stressful. Thank goodness for the recorder.”

New digital technologies do not threaten TV but, rather, support it if used in an integrated way. For example, BBDO New York’s Wheelchairs ad for Guinness, aired last year, received little TV airtime but the “hugeness” of it was in the volume YouTube hits it generated, which now amount to more than 10 million for the two versions of the ad posted on the site.

“We have always been really good at television, but it is always good to have all these colours added to the pallete,” he says.

 “TV is thriving, but there is all this other stuff that surrounds consumers to delight and blow their minds in a good way,”

While there are more ways than ever to connect with consumers, the focus must remain on the big idea, or risk creating “ad pollution”, he says. “The idea is a rare and valuable thing, and we are just executing it across different channels. There will be times when you want to make a big, lush film but then we are also surrounded with these other things that keep it going,” he says.

The agency’s much-trumpeted Vine campaign Fix-in-Six for US DIY retailer Lowes is a case in point. The campaign, which consists of a series of six-second stop-motion videos of DIY tips, was created by the BBDO New York production team’s experiments with the app, and not from a smaller digital or social shop as one might expect.

“It was really cheap, utilitarian and creative,” says Lubars. “But Vine was brand new a year ago, and now it is old and dated.”

All these new tools and technologies have ushered in a new era in advertising. While 10 years ago, it was all about digital, now creators have become “the markers”, he explains. “We have become the writer, the art director, the editor and the sound person. There will always be the big productions, but people need to make stuff and they need it cheap – cheap, fast and growing are the new keywords.”

Throughout the interview Lubars, reels off keywords and mantras. While he says his inability to switch his brain off can sometimes keep him awake at night, he likes to keep things simple, crunching his big ideas into nugget-sized mission statements that can be communicated throughout the agency. One that still resonates was introduced by Lubars in his first meeting at BBDO 10 years ago. He said BBDO needed to be “chefs, not waiters”, delivering ideas for clients, rather than taking orders.

When BBDO’s 80-year relationship with Gillette ended last year (“a punch in the gut”), Lubars rallied the team, reminding them that they had become waiters and not chefs for this client and it could not happen again. The agency swiftly bounced back, picking up new clients, including Viagra and Bud Light.

“Agencies are like life – bad things sometimes happen too, but we’ve been lucky that things have been mostly good,” he reflects.

For a man who has not only embraced, but created change throughout his career, Lubars seems (to steal one of his metaphors) deeply cemented in his current role. He does not know what the next decade of advertising will bring (“futurists are full of bullshit”), and is open to embracing the change “like a sponge”.

He sums up his plans for the next decade of his creative leadership, using another catchy phrase, this time borrowed from popular culture: keep on, keeping on.