2009 Innovator Series: Apple's ad man

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative director of TBWA/Worldwide, sits in front of the video matrix used during production of the Innovator Series in March. Photos by Kristi Miller

By Sarah MacDonnell

Dressed in jeans, an Adidas zip-up hooded sweatshirt and sneakers, Lee Clow, the 2009 Innovator Series lecturer, fit right in with the college crowd last March as he talked about how advertising has to work “at the speed of culture.”

Clow, chairman and chief creative director of TBWA/Worldwide, is Apple’s ad man. He created Apple Computer’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial that launched the Apple Macintosh, Apple’s “Think Different” campaign and more recently the “iPod people” campaign.

He was involved in the design and function of the Apple stores.

When the Internet was first emerging, the advertising industry was afraid, Clow said. “The promise of what the Internet meant to mass media and people as an audience consuming media on the Internet … basically we’re seeing the status quo get flipped on its head.” Clow said he was ready for the change early on.

He said it helped to be able to work with Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., because he said Jobs understood that the Internet was something that would change everything.

“I don’t know if he would have been able to explain, but his intuition said, ‘I’m going to introduce the world to technology that they’ve never used before, they’ve never seen before, and it’s going to change their lives, so it better mean something that’s not very intimidating and quite comfortable because I want everybody to use it,’ ” Clow said of Jobs.

Clow said he knew the Internet had big implications for his business as well. “I just saw it as an opportunity to kind of redefine what creative people in my business love to do. And that is, basically, finding ways to have conversations with people about brands.”

Clow is interviewed by journalist and author Warren Berger.

He said the Internet, compared with other media forms, allows instant feedback. “It’s a different world in the fact that you have to do advertising at the speed of culture. It has to keep up with the fact that culture is moving very fast and that it’s very responsive.” The transformation that’s going on in most good advertising companies is delightful, and young people are coming into the business with a totally different way at looking what their job is, Clow said. “I’m learning every day from young people in terms of every way you can harness the power of new media and connect the audiences.”