David Lubars retires—inside the BBDO leader’s singular creative career

David Lubars, who helped usher advertising into the digital age with BMW Films and later reinvigorated the venerable old-school agency BBDO, is retiring after four decades in the business. Lubars will hand the global chief creative officer role at BBDO to Chris Beresford-Hill, who recently rejoined the agency after seven years at TBWA\Chiat\Day and Ogilvy. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs He will remain at BBDO through the end of the year but step back over that period as Beresford-Hill transitions into the role. Also read: 21 top ads from David Lubars Era-defining work for the millenium Regarded as one of the great creative leaders in advertising history, Lubars spent time at Leonard Monahan Saabye (later Leonard Monahan Lubars), Chiat/Day and BBDO West before taking over the creative department at Fallon Minneapolis in 1998. It was at Fallon that Lubars would preside over era-defining work at a major inflection point for the industry. While many agencies clung to the old outbound, TV-driven model of engagement, Fallon gleefully experimented with the internet—creating a number of innovative campaigns, including, most famously, the 2001 branded content masterpiece BMW Films. Produced by David Fincher, BMW Films integrated the vehicles into blockbuster short films directed by A-listers such as Guy Ritchie and Tony Scott and featuring Hollywood stars from Clive Owen to Madonna. Due to the slow internet speeds of the time (this was four years before YouTube), users would sign up to have the films downloaded to their computers overnight—delivering a trove of audience data to BMW in the process. The campaign was a sensation, both in culture and the industry. (Dan Wieden created the Titanium Lions at Cannes in 2002 after the festival struggled to categorize BMW Films and barred it from the Film competition—it won only in Cyber.) But as glamorous and entertaining as the content was, for Lubars, it was less about hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite than solving a pressing brand problem. “The [target] audience was not watching much TV, even in 2001,” he told Ad Age last week. “They were traveling, they had kids. But they were going online a lot, so the answer was to go there with them. But it had to be voluntary—it couldn’t be imposed on them. It was a whole new kind of thing.” “Most of BMW’s work at the time was very traditional, but here they were banging up the cars and shooting at them,” said Greg Hahn, chief creative officer at Mischief, who worked closely with Lubars for two decades—first at Fallon, then at BBDO. (Hahn worked on the second round of BMW Films work.) “The big breakthrough was they understood it had to compete not with car commercials but with Hollywood entertainment. They also changed the whole economy of advertising by spending time and money on production, not media. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge breakthrough at the time.” BMW Films wasn’t a one-off. Fallon was learning the ways of the internet like few traditional agencies at the time. Lubars and Mark Sitley, then Fallon’s head of production, brought in guest speakers every Friday to talk about the digital space. After six months of this, the agency held an off-site to set goals for digital campaign work. One of the first results, in 2000, was the “Buddy Lee Challenge” for Lee Jeans. Led by the creative team of Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom (known as “the Swedes”), the campaign included quirky TV spots where Lee’s Buddy Lee mascot would fight goofy enemies—an idea that was then gameified online, where users could do the same. It was one of the early advertising efforts to connect TV and digital. To Lubars, it was also evidence of how creatives could own the digital revolution, rather than be sidelined by it. The value of storytelling hadn’t changed, after all, even if formats were in flux. Lubars knew it would be easier for creative people to learn the technology than for technologists to learn how to be storytellers. “So that’s what we did,” he said. “From this one off-site, things started to come.” A change agent at BBDO Lubars’ work at Fallon—which included highly regarded traditional campaigns as well, from Citibank’s “Live Richly” to EDS’s “Cat Herders” Super Bowl spot in 2000—caught the eye of everyone in the business. Soon, the most prestigious big agency in America came calling, wanting some of the Lubars magic. In 2004, he joined BBDO Worldwide as its chief creative officer, a role he would keep for two decades. It was a classic gamble of a creative hotshot being brought in to shake the cobwebs off a slow-moving legacy player. (New York magazine even published its own breathless Lubars-as-wunderkind profile at the time.) For the Brooklyn-born Lubars, it was a homecoming of sorts—but to an agency that wasn’t fully predisposed to welcome him. In the end, perhaps against all odds, Lubars not only succeeded in reinvigorating BBDO, but he did so quickly—and in a way that didn’t alienate everyone who’d been there for years. “It was daunting, but everyone there—[outgoing CEO] Allen Rosenshine, [incoming CEO] Andrew [Robertson], [former CCO] Phil Dusenberry, who was retired but still engaged—they all said, ‘We’ve got to change,’” Lubars said. “That was the philosophy. So it was embraced. It was exciting to come in as a change agent, as a provocateur. And it was on really fast.” Susan Credle, who would later run Leo Burnett and FCB’s global creative networks, had been at BBDO for almost 20 years when Lubars arrived. Yet she says he immediately put her at ease—something she was hardly expecting. “This is what’s so special about David,” she said. “He said to my partner Steve [Rutter] and me, ‘There’s a lot I have to fix here. I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you. You’re doing great. Keep doing what you’re doing, and just, thank you.’ He didn’t have to do that. I would have probably created a false narrative of, ‘I’m the old guard, he’s the new guard, he doesn’t care about us.’ It made me feel so comfortable.” Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here Hahn arrived from Fallon a year later and remembers how disarming Lubars was with longtime BBDO staffers, even when politics still often threatened to get toxic. “David’s energy was different than what they were used to,” he said. “They were very suspicious of him, and of me. There was a ‘Game of Thrones’ thing, this sense that the ECDs were out to get you and everyone had their fiefdoms. David would walk around and joke with people, and they were like, ‘What’s his game? What’s the angle?’ And there was none. It took a while, but the place did change.” One of the first big triumphs of the Lubars era—one that signaled the sea change BBDO had been hoping for—was HBO’s “Voyeur” in 2007. Featuring voyeurism-themed content scattered in all corners of the internet, as well as a striking video projection on a building on New York’s Lower East Side, the campaign was hugely ambitious, creatively varied and ultramodern. It won multiple Grand Prix at Cannes. “People [at BBDO] were like, ‘Shit, we did that?’ OK, it’s on now,” Lubars recalled. Aside from being cool and engaging, though, “Voyeur” once again solved a problem. With classic shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos” having wrapped up, and the “Game of Thrones” era still a few years away, “Voyeur” helped fill a gap between two golden ages at the network. “How do you keep your creative credentials and chops alive while this new stuff is being prepared, so they don’t think we’ve lost our way?” Lubars said. “‘Voyeur’ became new HBO content that was talked about in the cultural zeitgeist.” A- writer, A+ creative director At BBDO, Lubars was able to expand what he’d long considered his greatest skill—getting the most out of the people working for him. To be sure, Lubars was a strong writer himself. His father had been a writer at Doyle Dane Bernbach, and Lubars learned from him and other mentors over the years—Tom Monahan and Ernie Schenck at Leonard Monahan, Steve Hayden and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day. One Chiat writer perhaps taught him the most. Penny Kapasouz, who wrote the famous “If you can point, you can use Macintosh, too” print ad introducing Apple’s Mac in 1984, told Lubars he had a good portfolio—he’d arrived at Chiat at 23 having already won awards, after all—but everything was written in his own voice. “She told me, ‘We’ve got to make it in Steve Jobs’ voice,’” he recalled. “She broke me down, like in the Marines, until I was this quivering mass of protoplasm, then built me back up until I could write in his voice. Ever since, I’ve written in voices. She gave me the ultimate gift.” Lubars never thought he was the greatest writer—he considers himself an A- in that department—but he came to realize he had a skill that was perhaps even more valuable. “My strength was being a good enough writer to really know what was great. So, I surrounded myself with A+ people, and I helped them,” he said. “A lot of times, I worked with people I knew were better than me, but they weren’t getting anything done. I was always getting stuff done, so I helped them with that. I realized, oh, that’s something I can be really good at.” Those who’ve worked with Lubars testify that no one is better or quicker at recognizing a great idea and helping to nurture it—boiling it down to its essence. “He’s incredibly decisive,” said Beresford-Hill. “It’s one of the reasons why BBDO has been so prolific over the years. David is not afraid to make a creative call, and it really keeps things moving and keeps the work vibrant, so it doesn’t get stale or become overthought.” Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here Combined with that confidence of taste, Beresford-Hill added, is a commitment to simplicity that manifests not just in Lubars’ work but in his approach to the work. “He hates unnecessary complexity,” Beresford-Hill said. “When it comes to ideas and strategy, he reduces the challenge. When it comes to the insight, he reduces it to a simple thought. All the best work he’s been part of has been describable in one sentence. Then he pushes the execution to be as magical as possible. He’s just the master of reductive thinking everywhere. Everything is very understandable, from the work he creates to the way he leads. And that’s massively valuable in a big organization.” “His great gift is decisiveness,” Hahn said of Lubars. “You know exactly what he likes and what he doesn’t when you leave the room. There’s no gray area. And he’s quick. It’s very much yes or no, not a lot of maybe or ‘Did you try this?’ You know exactly where you stand, so you come with your stuff kind of buttoned up.” “David has an unexplainable grasp on what will work,” said Ali Rez, chief creative officer of Impact BBDO, the agency’s Middle East and North Africa network. “I can share three things with him, and he will always quickly point to one and say, ‘That—that is a winner.’ And that’s exactly what will happen. He has the gift of just knowing how creativity works, and it’s always been a magical thing to witness.” A good example of this is the Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign, which was introduced with the Betty White ad in the 2010 Super Bowl and is still running today. The idea—that you become a different, more irritable person when you’re hungry, and that Snickers helps you be yourself again—was one of literally thousands of ideas floated during concepting. “David Lynch has this line: ‘An idea is like a fish. You can’t make a fish. You can only catch a fish,’” said Andrew Robertson, CEO of BBDO Worldwide. “Nobody catches fish like David Lubars. ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ was a line buried in a Snickers script that he caught. It became the basis of one of the world’s most successful global campaigns.” “There were thousands of scripts. Everybody in the agency was working on that,” Hahn recalls. “I wasn’t CCO yet—he pulled me as an ECD, another set of eyes. And we both pulled out the one campaign. He can do it in a matter of seconds. It takes me a while. But he just instantly gets at the gold.” Lubars credits the creatives behind “You’re Not You”—Peter Kain and Gianfranco Arena—and said few ideas have been as universal or as flexible, considering the endless ways it’s been expressed over the years and how it’s traveled globally. “They were a distant No. 7 chocolate bar. After that campaign, they were a distant No. 1 chocolate bar,” Lubars said. “It runs in 83 countries. It’s a universal human story. Everybody can relate to it. We didn’t know half the places it would end up, like the ‘Hungerithm’ thing from a few years ago. With a big idea, you can do anything.” Long-running platforms for big brands There were so many other success stories through the years. On Lubars’ watch, BBDO specialized in crafting eye-catching, culturally relevant campaigns for some of the world’s biggest marketers—notable among them, AT&T and GE. The AT&T work has been impressively varied, from the stark visions of the “It Can Wait” don’t-text-and-drive PSAs to the comic Beck Bennett spots where the comedian sat around a classroom table bantering with kids. The GE work, too, was often grand and soaring, but with the human touch that made it relatable. To Lubars, it was no wonder these companies continued to choose BBDO as a partner. “BBDO’s a brand, too, and they came here for for the [creative] juice,” he said. “GE is a creativity company. I mean, talk about solving problems. They wanted to be seen as such. AT&T, same thing. What they provide is human connection. They came to us to reveal their magic. You can’t make any of this up. It has to actually be in there. But it’s about mining it and revealing it to the world.” Lubars also points to the Barbie work from BBDO San Francisco as a high point. The agency’s 2015 campaign for the Mattel doll helped set in motion a full brand reinvention, taking Barbie’s troublingly backward image and turning her into a symbol of empowerment. That transformation reached its apex with last year’s hit movie. “Moms didn’t want their daughters playing with Barbies because of bimbo sexist thing,” Lubars said. “But Barbie actually started out as a learning tool. It was a nice way to get it back to where the original charter was—another beautiful way to solve a problem. And then it led to where they’ve gone.” Finally, there is BBDO’s long-running partnership with Sandy Hook Promise, the organization set up in 2013 by the parents of children slain in Connecticut to teach people to recognize the warning signs of a school shooting before it happens. From the famous “Evan” spot in 2016 (below) to last year’s “Just Joking” (as it happens, the final piece of BBDO advertising Lubars worked on directly as a creator), the Sandy Hook work has redefined what’s possible in the PSA space, even winning the Emmy Award for outstanding commercial in two of the past four years (for “Back-to-School Essentials” and “Teenage Dream”). “The beauty of Sandy Hook is, it’s embraced in constituencies in both red and blue states, because it’s not taking a political view on guns,” Lubars said. “And they have metrics [about its effectiveness]—17 incidents prevented by schools who took the training and knew the signs. Imagine, 17 tragedies—times how many kids? And then the uncounted ones they can’t quantify. It’s a problem that’s not going away, but this is one realistic thing to do—know the signs.” Changing of the guard After 20 years of remarkably consistent success—the agency was named global Network of the Decade by Cannes Lions in 2020—Lubars is now stepping back from the great project of his career and handing the reins to one of his top protégés. He will be missed, of course, but the long game for any leader is to build something that can eventually thrive without you. “When David joined, BBDO was famous for brilliant crafted television commercials, but not much else,” said Robertson. “Now we are known as an agency that develops powerful foundational ideas and executes, with the same brilliant craft, in all forms.” For his part, Lubars—often described as restless—has simply decided it’s time for a rest. “Starting from Leonard Monahan Lubars all the way down, that’s 36 years I’ve been doing this,” he said. “The people I admire and respect, they’re not living off the fumes of something they did back in the day. They’re bringing stuff every year. Look at Susan Hoffman. I’ve tried to do that as a leader for our agencies. And that’s exhausting. It’s a constant sprint. There’s no shortcuts. It’s a sprint, and my knees are sore. I don’t want to sprint anymore.” For Beresford-Hill, whose first stint at BBDO ran from 2010 to 2017, the notion of succeeding Lubars is naturally daunting. But he said there’s no greater model to emulate—and no greater place to do so. “I still remember my first day at BBDO [in 2010],” he said. “I got a call from David’s admin saying, ‘David would like to see you.’ I remember walking to his office and being excited and a little bit nervous, and we had just a two-minute conversation. I perfectly remember him saying to me, ‘You know what, Chrissy, I think you’re going to do your best work here.’ When you’re a neurotic creative, you always feel like it’s never going to be better, it’s only going to be harder. I just loved the clarity and the confidence. And you know, he was right. BBDO has always been a place where creatives can let it rip on the biggest brands in the world. And it’s a testament to the culture he’s created.” Beresford-Hill said he plans to visit all the BBDO markets this year, and slowly begin to develop the kind of trust Lubars has cultivated through the years. “It’s the greatest opportunity I could ever have, but also the greatest responsibility I could ever have,” he said. “I love this agency so much. To me, the whole 23 years leading up to this have been preparation. I’m going to give every little drop I have to BBDO every day I’m here. So in some ways, it’s really simple, you know?” Lubars doesn’t have firm plans for retirement—he’s been told it’s a good idea to wait a few months before committing to anything. But he’ll certainly be keeping one eye on BBDO, as the advertising industry navigates its next big inflection point. “Creativity is baked into these walls, into the DNA of this place,” he said. “As we go forward, there’ll be all kinds of new things. I’m 65, Chris is 43. That’s basically how old I was when I got here. He’s really entered his prime and is ready to do it. And I’ll be watching from the sidelines like a demented Spike Lee at a Knicks game.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

David Lubars retires—inside the BBDO leader’s singular creative career

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