Lee Clow

Lee Clow is a member of the One Club Hall of Fame, the Art Directors Hall of Fame, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Advertising Hall of Fame. He was named 1997 Creative Executive of the Year by USA Today.

Lee is one of the original members of Chiat/Day, an agency that was founded in Los Angeles in 1968 and, in many ways, the growth of the agency has reflected the growth of Southern California as a creative community and the region’s advertising industry. In the beginning, the accounts were mostly industrial and technical with a strong emphasis on B2B. In fact, Chiat/Day launched a few little companies you may well know like Intel and National Semiconductor. Then came the growth and expansion of Japanese businesses like Pioneer, Mitsubishi and Yamaha into the American market, and the emergence of Silicon Valley, bringing with it the emergence of computers and high technology.

The influence Chiat/Day had on entire advertising categories is what made the agency famous. Apple Computer’s advertising changed the way business talked to business, introduced the world to the personal computer and reinvented the role of the SuperBowl along the way. And before Nike and the Energizer Bunny, if you asked someone what category would be doing the most creative advertising on television in the future, they probably wouldn’t have given their vote to athletic shoes or batteries. Chiat/Day made it permissible for companies to seek out creativity and good advertising in cities other than New York and Chicago.

To Lee, advertising isn’t so much a business as it is an art form. Every campaign is an opportunity to express a company’s point of view in the most engaging, imaginative and artistic way possible.

Where others try to bulldoze consumers into submission, Clow goes through another door with messages that entertain, thrill and delight. Sometimes it’s the words. Sometimes it’s the pictures. Sometimes it’s both. But by the time the company logo comes up on the screen, or readers get to the logo at the bottom of the page, Clow has developed a brand personality consumers have fallen in love with. He’s rewarded them for using their brains. He’s given them reason to smile.

Since Lee began with Chiat\Day and its humble beginnings in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the agency has grown to be one of the ten largest networks in the world with more than 237 offices, in 75 countries with 8100 employees worldwide. Now, under Lee’s leadership, TBWA\ is without dispute, one of the most innovative agency networks in the world. TBWA\Chiat\Day was voted in 1997 Agency of the Year by USA Today, Adweek, Advertising Age, Shoot Magazine and Advertising Age’s Creativity. TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris in South Africa was voted “Agency of the Century” and combined with other flagship offices in London, Paris and Amsterdam, TBWA\ has won every advertising award imaginable many times over.

Think of the most talked-about advertising in the world and Lee and his work force have likely been involved. From Apple Computer and a spot called “1984” (which is considered by advertising insiders to be one of the best commercials ever made); to Energizer and the invention of the Energizer Bunny; to Nissan and the “Shift_” campaign; back to Apple, inviting the public to “Think different.” And, most recently, teaching the world that “Impossible is Nothing” for adidas.

Come into Lee’s office today and (aside from the fact that the agency is 300 times the size, with 500 people in California alone) it’s much like it was twenty years ago: Clow, the tall, bearded man clad in a T-shirt, shorts and his trademark sandals, is jotting down thoughts in his journal. The artist, who happens to be in the advertising business, remains comfortably at work.