A glimpse into the future of advertising, as seen by David Lubars

Simina Mistreanu, 10 Feb 2009

Romanian version

Few weeks after his 50th anniversary, David Lubars, chairman and Chief Creative Officer at BBDO North America, woke up one day at the top of The Big Won list of best creative officers in the world. The “world’s best” distinction also attached to one of the agencies he runs and to one of the works he signed upon. In an interview to Wall-Street, Lubars tells about how he sees through the grey-colored glass windowpane on Avenue of Americas, the future of advertising as it is plotting its way out of these stormy times.

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From BMW Films to HBO Voyeur

In 2008, when advertising gobbled down record money and juries of the ad festivals faced the weariness with resilience, a campaign managed to come out first in The Big Won – the survey of the world’s best marketing communications as measured by the quantity and quality of awards won – with more than double scoring than of second-ranked. It was “Voyeur”, the ad campaign crafted by BBDO New York for HBO.

The story of HBO Voyeur sounds like this: the consumer steps in the shoes of a voyeur character, witness of eight stories he watches through a stripped-away wall of a building in New York. The stories have the classic ingredients: love, hatred, murder, forgiveness, suspense. They connect with one another and are inspired from HBO movies. “The transparent wall” is a life-size projection on the wall of an apartment building in New York using two cutting-edge rear projectors. The experience continues on the campaign’s website where the city slides open with new stories behind the walls, connected to an on-demand movie on HBO. The campaign was the breakthrough of 2008 of integrated media and took home two Grand-Prix from the Cannes Festival and other gold-plated prizes.

Lubars is used to put “Voyeur” campaign into words. “It had I think 11 different distribution channels, it wasn’t just a television campaign with a few things on a side. It was 11 different things that were equally important and all verging on to something much bigger. And that’s new.” Before stating the big idea, the junction point, he rewinds to BMW Films – another legendary campaign he worked on while he was at a smaller, yet highly creative ad-agency: Fallon Worldwide.

BMW Films, a series of short-length features directed by Hollywood’s heavyweights (such as Guy Ritchie and John Woo) and aired over the internet, received the first-ever Titanium Lion in the history of Cannes Festival. In his almost 30 years in advertising, Lubars gathered loads of trophies at big ad festivals: Cannes, Clio, Andy, D&AD, Effie, EMMY.

But now, in 2009, we’re talking about something different: the will to dig up for an idea big and good enough to be replicated on all mediums that cross your mind, and to be fit for each one of them.

“Back in the early 2000’s just doing something online was new and different. But the films themselves were just little films. That’s all it was. The next phase was to do films online, but then also do films on cell phone, do a website that you can interact with and discover and find things. Talk with bloggers, have a wall projection that looks like a piece of art on the side of a building. And then we did a film on the television station HBO, an on-demand film. We also did commercials in print and guerilla postings that you didn’t know it was part of it unless you knew. Over three hours of content, if you really dug deep enough to find it.

That’s very different from a 6 minutes film”.

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