Into the Library: David Lubars on The Work, The Work, The Work

After twenty years at the helm of BBDO and over forty years in the industry, David Lubars is retiring, with Chris Beresford-Hill, Americas CCO, stepping up to the global role. 

Throughout his career, David has picked up a whopping 600 Cannes Lions, 700 One Show pencils, and seven Emmys. He’s been named by Forbes as one of the top 10 creative directors ever and under his leadership, BBDO has been Network of the Year at Cannes Lions seven times and was named Network of the Decade in 2020. He’s shepherded work that has made a real difference to clients and has even saved lives. Thanks to his electric energy, crystal clear vision and eye for talent, the network has more than lived up to its tagline: The Work, The Work, The Work.

David started his career in 1982 as a copywriter for Leonard Monahan Saabye, then moved to Chiat/Day LA where he wrote for Apple. In 1988, he returned as a partner to Leonard Monahan Lubars, then headed to BBDO West as CEO and CCO. In 1998 he headed up Fallon Minneapolis before finally finding a home as global chief creative officer at BBDO, a network he’s led with panache alongside CEO Andrew Robertson.

And now, it’s time for the music-loving basketball player from Brooklyn to find a slightly less frantic rhythm to play along with. 

“To do what we’ve done, which is bring it every year - even if we’re not first, we’re always top three - that’s really difficult to do,” says David. “I’ve been doing it for over 40 years. The people I admire, like Susan Hoffman or my successor Chris Beresford-Hill, they bring it every year. That’s hard to do. It’s like running the 100 metres sprint speed over a marathon. I’m ready to walk now. My knees are sore. It seems like a good time. Chris is here as an amazing successor and is going to start the next window of BBDO excellence.”

This news may come as a shock to those who are familiar with David’s alert, always-on energy but there will be some time to get used to the transition. “I’m going to use an industry metaphor: I’m going to do a slow dissolve till the end of the year instead of a hard cut,” he says. His office is packed up and he’ll be working part time and from home. “I think people will call me for things but it’s really in Chris’s hands now.”

Speaking of Chris, David says that he’s considered him as a potential successor for many years. He worked for the BBDO between 2010 and 2018 before leaving to go to TBWA. In September, when TBWA’s Nancy Reyes joined BBDO as their Americas CEO, Chris soon followed her, returning to the agency.

“I saw the potential in him as this guy who could someday be my successor because not only is he a great creative and inspired that way, but he’s a good soul and he has great leadership.”

And so, as David prepares to take some time to decompress and unplug - he’s looking forward to being able to skip Cannes finally and spend Father’s Day with his family - what better time to take a second to look back on a small selection of the vast catalogue of creativity that have made up an incredibly impactful career.

“My favourites have been the ones that solve really tough problems,” says David. “Some of them are famous, some of them are not as famous, but the ones that really fix something are the ones I like.”

I joined the company as a partner and my name was on the door. So I pitched it, led the team on the pitch, and did the work. It was the first time I did all these things, without a boss.. and it was lovely work. It solved a tough problem, which was everybody was buying these high-techy, athletic shoes and Keds had wondered, ‘well jeez, should we position it as the athletic shoes and for junior high school girls?’ No, pull it towards what it is. They’re just cool, kicking around shoes you could throw in a washing machine. So, we went opposite - anti-athletic shoes. It says, ‘introducing Keds weightlifting shoes’ and she’s lifting her baby. That was a nice way to be anti what was going on. It was really, really solid - they sold tons of Keds back then.

They had no money and so we found a great stock footage thing and turned it into a cultural zeitgeist. It was really different. I remember some of the previous BBDO-ers from New York saying ‘don’t tell anybody what that cost!’ because it was certainly not $3 million. It was a $157,000 commercial - I can tell you now 20 years later.

This was an interesting problem. EDS were in a pitch for the US Navy to do their systems. They were pitching against IBM and some other really big, more famous players. The idea was to go to the Super Bowl, even though the audience, really, was 12 people in the Navy, to show that we’re a good, big, important company too. Isn’t it funny how the audience is 120 million eyeballs or whatever? But really, we wanted 12. It was really good for the company. I think they won that account - because they were good - but the Super Bowl helped them be seen as a serious player.

At the time - 1999, 2000, 2001 - everybody was talking about ‘bricks and mortar, clicks and mortar’ and that everything was going to be digital now. But I remember thinking, “You don’t just learn how to do a big idea, to do storytelling, and place and land a brand and a special world that people can connect to just because you know technology - although we can learn technology. So, we’re going to learn that.”

I had a head of production back then, who every Friday morning would bring in somebody for me to meet who was doing new things. After six months of that, I took those four or five people and we had this big offsite. This was a fusion, we had to do this kind of stuff in advertising that they were doing in other [areas]. The first thing we did was called the Buddy Lee challenge for Lee Jeans with that little doll, Buddy. It was very primitive but at the time pretty cool, where you would watch these commercials on TV, where he goes up against the racecar driver or different people. And then it says, ‘play the game at BuddyLeeChallenge.com’ and you could actually play the game against the racecar. It’s an interesting, integrated campaign in a primitive form.

The next thing was BMW films. The reason that happened was, again, to solve a problem. The audience for BMW films was mostly male, between 30s and 50s and they weren’t watching enough TV, even back in 2001. They were doing other things - travelling, kids, video games, constantly online. The client was like, “Well, how do we get these people to see our new models?” The idea was, that’s where they are, let’s go there. If you’re going to go there on a screen and you’re asking them to visit you voluntarily, it has to become entertaining. It solved a lot of problems for them - talk about a zeitgeist moment!

It started out as an hour film but because of the limitations of technology back then, it actually became better. You couldn’t scram an hour because there was no streaming back then. You had to download it - it would be like an elephant down a hose. So, it was broken up into chapters and then, instead of having chapters, we gave each one a different director instead.

It just became a magical thing that took off. And Cannes killed it the first year we entered it because they didn’t know what it was. What do you mean? You’re supposed to recognise out-of-the-box thinking and you’re killing it for being out-of-the-box? And it’s the best car demo ever? I was really upset. The next year Dan Wieden, who was amazing, created the Titanium for the second round. It was supposed to recognise things that are uncategorisable. That’s what it is. It all just worked out.

That work was all about [the idea that] there’s more to life than money. Imagine a bank saying that? It was part of that whole dotcom boom of the crazy late ‘90s, and all these zillionaires were wandering off leaving you feeling like you’re not accomplishing anything - and you are. You’re making ok money, you can have a good life - let us help you figure it out. It was really good for them.

The HBO Voyeur work also solved a very complex problem, which was that all their great shows were finishing. The Sopranos was ending, Sex and the City was ending and they had these new shows that were not landing… but they had these other ones in the world already. They were shooting Game of Thrones and some other things - so, what do we do in this year-and-a-half between to stay hot and relevant so people don’t think we’ve lost the plot with John in Cincinnati? 

I’ve tried to do innovative things, being such a bored person all the time and looking for something effervescent and new. But that’s what solved the problem - it wasn’t just to do it for doing it’s sake. It’was, “let’s create an event that makes people go, ‘oh HBO is so cool’.”

I can’t give you the numbers because it’s a privately held company, but they were a distant number seven chocolate bar and now they’re a distant number one because of an insight. The insight was so big, the idea was so cool and big, that it let us develop pieces later. Like Hungerithm - that technology didn’t exist when we first started the idea!

There’s so many other things we’ve done since because of that idea. You could take the great Doyle, Dean Volkswagen ads from 1962 and you do it differently but those ideas are timelessly great. That’s what a big idea gives you. There are so many channels and touchpoints now it’s like a pyramid of marbles, so if you don’t have a big idea holding it together, the whole thing is gonna scatter across the floor and you’re going to slip and slide when you walk into the room. You need a big idea more than ever now, to hold the whole thing together and have people understand what you are.

The initial Super Bowl spot was in 2010. But now, it does so many other things in, I think, 83 countries because it’s a universal human truth that you get cranky and annoyed when you’re hungry.

It solved a crazily difficult problem. Barbie was created by Ruth Handler and she had two children named Barbie and Ken. This was in the ‘50s and Ken has got spaceman toys and cowboy toys, all kinds of creative things that you can imagine yourself as. And then Barbie has a baby doll. 

That’s why you get president Barbie and scientist barbie because it’s supposed to be a creative tool that little girls could imagine all the things that they could be. But over the decades just, because of the way culture was, it went into a bimbo-y, unrealistic body type thing.

By the time we got hired, the research showed that little girls would play with Barbie but they were being blocked by their moms who don’t want to give them ‘bimbo toys’. And those moms loved playing with Barbi when they were kids. So we did that film to say, look, let’s go back to the charter. Let’s reveal the real truth. The truth is the only thing that works.

Then you start seeing astronaut Barbie and different body type Barbies and different skin tone Barbie and all kinds of interesting Barbies based on this film. It was on the cover of Time Magazine, it became this zeitgeist moment and they stood up more and more so it ended up becoming a women’s empowerment movie.

You can’t be great unless you're good, right? So we’ve tried to be really good. The beauty of having a diverse group of people at the agency was that The Talk could never have been thought of by anybody but Black people because nobody else knew about it. You have to have a good group who understands the whole scope of culture. So the credit I’ll take there is that we had the right people work on it to really address it.

Sandy Hook Promise

I’ve been kind of consistently involved through the 10 or 11 years that we’ve worked on that. We’ve had some brilliant people come in and out. On ‘Just Joking’, I worked with the creative team as a creator. I am proud of that as the very last piece of creative I made, because I still think of myself as a maker. I’ll miss that part.

 

         

            

It’s solving a difficult problem. Those films and Sandy Hook Promise as an organisation are accepted in both anti- and pro-gun culture. Really. Because it’s all about recognising the signs. It’s not about vilifying. So, they have a lot of success in red states. They can point to 17 documented school incidents that they’ve prevented - that’s 17 times how many hundreds of students? They’re an amazing organisation and they continue to make inroads and have acceptance because they embrace all. There are 400 million guns in this country, you’re not going to get rid of them all, so in the meantime let’s do something.

I had a meeting with my global worldwide board - it’s an extraordinary, small, amazing group of people. It’s Ali Rez. It’s Bridget [Alkema] in Clemenger. It’s Alvaro [Becker] down in Chile. It’s Nick and Nadja in the UK. Josy Paul in India. Luis Sanchez. And now Chris and Matt McDonald here in New York.

It’s like a family with this business model, and they’re really good souls. We work on a lot of good things, put together all-star, bespoke teams to make the right things happen and so that’s why I wanted to put in some of their work. We all have these things together where we help each other and I think it makes the whole system lift and all the boats go up.

I feel like I’m leaving it better than I found it because it was always good. Now it’s really, really good - top of its game.