Lee Clow, the Man Behind Think Different, Retires: What Did the Last Generation of Mad Men Leave Behind?

Fifty years in the business, and Lee Clow stuck to one test for an idea: is it simple enough to print on a T-shirt?

Few advertising people ever get a client in as much peril as Apple was in 1984. IBM's army was closing in, and within a year Steve Jobs would be pushed out of the company he had founded. Lee Clow caught that moment.

Apple's one-minute Super Bowl commercial 1984, which aired that year, became a classic, ranked on list after list as the greatest television commercial ever made. It was directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner, with Lee Clow as the creative director behind it.

In 1997, Clow got another call. The voice on the other end said: "Guess what — Amelio just resigned, I'm taking over as Apple's CEO. Can you come help me?" That is how Think Different came about.

On Valentine's Day 2019, at 75, Lee Clow announced his retirement. In a love letter to advertising, he listed, in order, what advertising is for: "Make people laugh, make people cry, make people think. Show them something new, get them to see the world differently…" Last on the list: "…and maybe get them to buy something?"

Today's advertising business measures return on spend, not creative value; it runs on CPM, CPC, RPM, CTR, TAC, DAU. Clow is not mainstream in it. An ad man who was still calling for small studios as recently as last year had been outside the mainstream for more than a decade.

Tim Cook said in a statement: "Lee Clow brought sweeping brand stories to life. He showed new technology with passion, creativity and originality, and he defined Apple's personality. He helped Apple through many challenging periods. His work opened the eyes of countless viewers to an exciting future."

Lee Clow's influence on advertising goes well beyond that, but most of his best-known work did come from the years he spent with Jobs. After retiring, his title — global chairman of TBWA\Media Arts Lab, the agency brand under TBWA\Chiat\Day that exists to serve Apple — becomes an advisory one, honorary chairman.

Advertising today is no longer led by star creative directors like Lee Clow, and the title "creative director" itself has been handed out to everyone. The holding companies that run the industry are built around growth, and under the pressure of the digital era ad people are asked to put out more ads, faster and cheaper.

A generation of American advertising people rose in the 1980s. They inherited the creative tradition of the 1960s Mad Men, and, backed by global brands, the technology revolution and the television networks, they reached much further.

Among all of them, Lee Clow, a West Coast man, had a particular love for large, carefully made brand art. He stood for a belief: that brands should change the world.

The Super Bowl and the Los Angeles Olympics: In 1984, Advertising Became a Visual Medium

Lee Clow is quiet, tall and bearded. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, he still turns up at the office in shorts and sandals. He was drafted during the Vietnam War but served at home. After the army he went back to school to study design, then joined a company called N.W. Ayer.

He later explained in an interview why he left: "I realized I didn't want to become that — serving clients, being careful, where the creative work is controlled and takes no risks. Hell, I grew up surfing."

He read in the newspaper that a young agency in Venice Beach, California, called Chiat\Day, was hiring. To get the job, Clow made his own T-shirts, small ads and bumper stickers reading "Hire the Hairy," and spent a year pestering the agency's creative director.

In 1981, Chiat\Day bought an agency called Regis McKenna, which had a five-year contract with Apple.

At the time the great wave of consolidation later driven by Martin Sorrell, the future CEO of the WPP advertising group, had not yet begun; mergers between creative shops were still mostly a way to win new clients. Lee Clow, by then a creative director, began his first work with Apple.

Jobs's brief to the agency was simple. The Macintosh was about to launch, against a personal computer industry about to be swallowed by IBM: "Stop the world in its tracks."

Jobs cared only about impact, and had never heard of the Super Bowl. The agency convinced him that the live broadcast of the NFL's annual championship game was the right moment.

The Cold War had not ended, and the prophecy in Orwell's novel had come true across half the globe. "We thought about how the arrival of the copier had a huge impact on closed societies like the Soviet Union — underground publications, people passing manuscripts around, all of it made possible by Xerox," Steve Hayden, the copywriter on the team, later recalled. As they brainstormed, trying to imagine what the personal computer would change, one line jumped out: "Why 1984 Won't Be Like 1984."

It was only a line, with no picture. The picture came from Lee Clow: a young woman running to hurl a baseball bat at the dictator on the giant screen.

Not long after, the team met Ridley Scott in Los Angeles. Scott suggested swapping the bat for a sledgehammer: "That would be a more universal symbol."

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial

"The whole nature of advertising, and the way it became a visually driven medium, has a lot to do with Lee Clow and the work at Chiat\Day," said Bob Kuperman, who retired as chairman of DDB New York in 2005.

Not surprisingly, Apple's board — more practical than Jobs — did not like 1984, which showed the new product for only a few seconds at the very end. Jobs, then running the Mac division, had already handed off the CEO job. To get around the board, Chiat\Day sold 30 seconds of the planned 90-second slot to other brands, cut the ad down, then claimed the remaining 60 seconds could not be sold, so they had no choice but to shoot it. In fact they had never meant to sell it. The next year Jobs left Apple, and the advertising business soon went to another agency, BBDO.

1984 is still considered the best commercial in Super Bowl history, and it turned the Super Bowl's break into a dazzling, high-profile showcase for brands — to this day the most expensive and most creative ad time in America.

Lee Clow was not finished with 1984. During the Los Angeles Summer Olympics he made another pioneering campaign, this one for Nike: I ❤️ LA.

Lee Clow made a music-video-style ad set to Randy Newman's song I ❤️ LA

I ❤️ LA was the start of Nike's long feud with the International Olympic Committee. It was the first time Nike ran ambush marketing around a major sporting event, something that later became almost a tradition for the brand. One organization surveyed consumers after the Games and found they believed Nike was the official sponsor of the LA Olympics. It was Converse.

Clow's two feats in 1984 had something in common: seize on a big event, make cheap creative work, and win big with a small bet. Nike paid no sponsorship fee at all. Apple did buy Super Bowl airtime, but according to Ridley Scott, who later gave the numbers, 1984 cost less than $250,000 to shoot, under "brutal budget constraints," while all the press coverage that followed was worth about $150 million in exposure.

Think Different Succeeded and Nissan Failed: Creativity Doesn't Always Work

Not every idea in Lee Clow's career worked, of course.

In 1997, Chiat\Day made Think Different for the Apple that Jobs had just returned to, along with the classic television commercial "Here's to the Crazy Ones." The campaign became the mark of Lee Clow's career.

Few people now mention the "failure case" he and his agency made around the same time, in 1997, for Nissan.

"In the '90s brands didn't fail because consumers hated them, they failed because people weren't interested in them," Adam Morgan, then an agency executive, told The Wall Street Journal. "Unless you're a very big company with a big enough budget to force consumers to remember your ads, you have to do something different."

How is that any different from today?

The holding-company era was already taking shape. In 1995, after a financial crisis, Chiat\Day merged with the Paris agency TBWA and ended up inside the Omnicom Group.

The merged TBWA Chiat/Day sat at the center of the storm sweeping the industry. The traditional Madison Avenue view was that an ad only had to give consumers one good enough reason to buy the product. TBWA Chiat/Day's idea was to make striking images for clients and let the brand carry more of the value, because most consumer-goods markets had become functionally identical and hard to tell apart from competitors.

Clow's experiments with disruptors like Apple and Nike drew the attention of carmakers, who had far bigger budgets. Nissan wanted to stand out in the low- and mid-price market, and Bob Thomas, CEO of its U.S. business, thought the company needed a fun advertising character, something like Energizer's pink bunny.

Thomas went to TBWA Chiat/Day, which made Nissan a series of ad films in 1996 and 1997 unlike anything the car industry had seen. A Japanese actor played Mr. K; most shots showed neither the brand name nor a car. The line was: Life is a journey, enjoy the ride.

Nissan's 1996 commercial: Toys

Each spot cost more than $1 million to produce, and the press praised the campaign as soon as it appeared. "Lee Clow no longer has to prove himself," announced a USA Today headline. Oprah quoted a critic on her show saying that Nissan's Toys was one of the most entertaining things on television that year.

Nissan's dealers were unmoved. The Wall Street Journal interviewed the general manager of an auto mall on Long Island, New York: "I think it's a great commercial, but they seem to be showing a bunch of cars that aren't made any more. This ad won't sell cars."

When the ads ran, Nissan had no new model out, while Toyota was cutting the price of the Camry sharply and Honda was pushing its newly launched Civic hard. In the month the ads went up, Nissan's U.S. sales fell 2.7% year on year; over the next two months they fell 10.2% and 4.2%. The ads had persuaded no one to buy a car.

Does that mean the big-film approach does not work for something as expensive and complicated as a car? Lee Clow was confident it did. He said: "A car is just a $25,000 piece of clothing you drive every day, for three years."

Nissan changed agencies in the late 1990s over the sales problem, but came back before long. In fact, after 2000 many carmakers began making the internet era's first short-film ads — led by the luxury brands.

Unlike Nissan, Apple had no important new product when it ran Think Different either. It was simply a declaration of return, and a jab at IBM's slogan, Think. But a year later the company released the multicolored iMac, a revolutionary piece of personal-computer design, which became one of the best-selling computers in history.

The two campaigns Lee Clow made in 1997, with such opposite fates, are the advertising industry in miniature.

People were starting to see that the age when one golden line from a 1960s Mad Man could make a brand a commercial success was over; creativity does not always work. Scale and coordination, the faith of Martin Sorrell and his WPP, became the theme of the next 20 years.

Lee Clow's luck was not only that Jobs trusted him. It was that over the next decade Apple kept shipping disruptive products — the iPod, the Apple Store, the iPhone, the App Store — each one a natural endorsement of wildly imaginative advertising. Clow was good at making work for that challenger role, as he was later with Impossible Is Nothing, the campaign he made for Adidas when its U.S. business was at its lowest point.

A collection of the iPod silhouette ads

The first iPhone ad: Hello

If an Idea Can Be Printed on a T-Shirt, It Works Anywhere

In his twenties, Lee Clow's goal was "to do great advertising without having to move to New York."

"Back then I watched everything happen in New York." Before he joined Chiat\Day, Clow watched Madison Avenue become the center of American advertising. "Bernbach (the founder of DDB) taught us that advertising should be smart, funny, likable and memorable."

To this day many advertising people in Los Angeles say only Chiat\Day, never the full name it took after the merger. Lee Clow is the model of the West Coast Mad Man: freer, more relaxed, close to Hollywood.

Entertainment was the West Coast's strength, and it also became the way out these agencies found first in the digital era. While New York's ad people talked constantly about opening yet another new (digital, social) agency, Los Angeles had a group of survivors of the dot-com bubble with loyal car clients, going through a slower and different kind of digital change.

Bob Greenberg, founder of R/GA, another West Coast agency, said in 2016: "The idea of a commercial interrupting the audience is out of date. That means we should build more partnerships with local production companies like Maker Studios and Fullscreen, and produce content-driven influencers."

Another industry-wide trend was companies building more of their own marketing teams while, at the same time, advertising groups began setting up dedicated standalone agencies for their biggest clients.

Lee Clow had proposed both ideas a decade earlier. In 2006, TBWA Worldwide set up a 50-person team just for Apple, named TBWA\Media Arts Lab. Nine were media planners; the rest were the TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team that handled Apple. All 50 moved into a separate building in California. Clow, then global chief creative officer, started it. He said: "Words and pictures are still tools. [Today] we have to be more creative in how we tell stories and how we talk to consumers." He defined Media Arts as "the art of understanding every touchpoint a brand has, and then using them to deliver a message."

In some ways Media Arts Lab was ahead of many others: standalone teams that combined creative and media for one client, an emphasis on content marketing, an entertainment way of working.

But the partnership between Media Arts Lab and Apple hit its low point in 2014, when Cook first rejected proposals for social-media campaigns, then announced that Apple would hire 1,000 advertising people in house. As many brands that built their own teams in the years since have found, an in-house marketing team at a large company faces no competitive pressure and cannot solve everything.

"What's put our industry in trouble is all these new tools, new technologies and the complexity of delivering messages around the world. The tools and the technology are overwhelming," Lee Clow said. "I think looking for simple, pure creative ideas is the only way to make advertising fun again."

Apple's ads over the past year — the Chinese New Year film The Bucket, and Welcome Home for the HomePod — still use the method of 1984: start from one simple idea, then make beautiful, visually forceful images.

What has changed are the brand touchpoints Lee Clow talks about. Take Welcome Home: there is the full four-minute music video, the single that the singer Anderson Paak released first on Apple Music, outdoor ads, social media pushes. The whole idea is broken into countless pieces, and can still be put back together into one.

The Welcome Home ad film

And the HomePod speaker was a very unsuccessful product. With Apple's brand and its distribution, it sold a fraction of what Amazon's speakers sold, or even Google's.

In a set of interviews published by Adweek on February 15, Greg Greenberg, Media Arts Lab's current group creative director, spoke about his impression of Lee Clow and told a story that may show better than anything else where Clow's creative legacy still has value today:

"I remember once a colleague and I brought him an idea, and he really liked it. Then Lee told us to go and think about what that idea would look like on a T-shirt. At first I thought it was strange. Everyone now talks in BS jargon about 'innovative 360-degree integrated immersive native media content,' and he tells us to make T-shirts? Later I understood how he saw it: if an idea works on a T-shirt, then it's simple and clean enough to work anywhere else."

"A T-shirt. We could probably all use one these days."

Cover image from TBWA\Chiat\Day