2004 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient: Lee Clow

Lee Clow has been making advertising for almost 40 years. He says he "loves telling the stories brands have to tell."

Lee believes advertising is art—media art. As he says, "It must make you feel something. It can make you laugh or cry or surprise you or inform you, but you must want to watch it."

Whether it's the famous "1984" commercial introducing Apple's Macintosh, or the crazy Energizer bunny still going and going; refreshing the World with Pepsi, or the celebration of sport in the adidas "Impossible is Nothing" campaign; the love you can feel for dogs in Pedigree's "Dogs Rule" campaign, to asking "What's G" for Gatorade; all of this is work people want to watch.

And perhaps there's no better example of Lee's impact in the industry than his 30-plus-year partnership with Steve Jobs. They created the now famous work for the rebirth of Apple in 1997. It used walls, pages and films that recognized those who "Think Different." And, during the past decade he helped orchestrate Apple's move into music with iPod and iTunes with the celebrated Silhouettes campaign, into phones with the category redefining iPhone and then creating the "campaign of the decade" Mac vs PC, before last year forging a whole new category with iPad. Most recently, Lee led the creative teams that launched Apple Music to the world. And worked on the introduction of the Apple Watch.

Lee continues to find the business fun and challenging. He believes we are at the beginning of the most exciting time the "advertising" business has ever seen. While lots of people are talking about the challenge of the multimedia future, he believes it is the biggest opportunity for creative minds since the first Creative Revolution of the 1960s.

Lee believes that "today everything can be considered media. The Internet has changed the way people interact with brands. If you like a brand, you can seek it out. If you don't like a brand, you can criticize it publicly. Or ignore it. So everything a brand does must tell its story in a disruptive and artful way. Then people will decide whether they like your brand or not. Lee's goal for TBWA is for the agency to become artists in all media, and create ideas that can orchestrate and define how brands behave in the world.

Since he began with Chiat\Day and its humble beginnings at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the agency has grown to be one of the 10 largest global networks and is without dispute one of the most innovative and awarded agency networks in the world.

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, and was honored by the Clios with a Lifetime Achievement Award and Cannes Lions with the Lion of St. Mark. In 2015, Lee was also inducted into American Advertising Federation's Hall of Fame.

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