Creative Class Acts

I confess, I was hoping for a smackdown. A sort of War of the Worlds of advertising philosophies. In one corner, in neatly pressed trousers and black cashmere sweater, would be BBDO's diminutive King of Old Media, Phil Dusenberry, defending the 30-second spot, the Super Bowl blowout, and the wall-to-wall network blitz. In the other corner, in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, would be his successor and nemesis, the agency's Young Turk of Nontraditional Media, David Lubars, dismissing such Paleolithic thinking in favor of cutting-edge technologies.

Body slams weren't required, but a few sharp exchanges a la Carville and Novak would have been nice. But real life rarely provides such dramatically satisfying black-and-white distinctions, and this was no exception. The two agreed: The Super Bowl isn't going to be replaced by weird chickens-in-bondage Web sites. People will continue to spend a lot of time in front of the tube. And big brands are still willing to spend big bucks with big agencies. Don King, your job is safe.

So what's left to talk about? A lot. Despite the supposed recovery, the ad business is still in a funk. No industry confab can adjourn without hand-wringing over clutter, fragmentation, and disappearing demographics. (Where are those lost boys, ages 18 to 24?) And few duos are better positioned to speculate on what it all means than Dusenberry and Lubars, the past and current creative directors of one of the country's largest and most prestigious agencies.

A legend in the industry, Dusenberry boasts a resume that includes campaigns not only for GE ("We bring good things to life") and Pepsi (from coining the "Pepsi Generation" theme to the infamous Michael Jackson spot) but also for Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection bid. Clients still gush over Dusenberry, who retired in 2002. "The hallmark of working with Phil," says former PepsiCo chairman Roger Enrico, "was that he'd make your imagination soar with his storyboards, but then his ads were always even better than you had imagined."

Lubars, who joined the agency in September of last year, was already a star, having earned cachet at Minneapolis-based Fallon Worldwide as the architect of the BMW Internet films, a campaign deemed so groundbreaking that in 2003 the Cannes International Advertising Festival created an entire new category -- a Titanium Lion -- to recognize it. Between that and his work for Citibank (most famously, the hilarious identity-theft series) and Lee jeans, he seemed the ideal guy to carry the torch, deliver smart work -- and be sufficiently geeky to appreciate smart mobs, podcasting, and communication along the lines of "wut r u doing 2nite?"

After a year at the creative helm, Lubars has already made his influence felt, with awards, new accounts -- Mitsubishi, eBay, e*Trade, and Levitra -- and exciting new work. But for all that he has been exalted as the Face of a New Generation, he'd tell you he's more Dusenberry 2.0 than a whole new operating system. Both believe in the power of big insights, both insist the work has to be so entertaining that consumers gravitate to it, and both lament the current craze for return-on-investment-driven advertising.

But there are also clear differences. In the Dusenberry era, employees joked that BBDO stood for "bring it back and do it over." Dusenberry says the ability to stop bad work is the only power a creative director really has, and boasts that his office was called the "quake zone" because of the fear he struck in even senior people. "The more they quake, the less they'll waste your time with work that's less than their best," he writes in his memoir, Then We Set His Hair on Fire (see excerpt, page 80).

Lubars says his style leans more toward the inclusive than the intimidating. "I want people to challenge me. I want them to feel they can step up and bring ideas. I insist on not being the smartest guy in the room. But if I hear everything, then I can help craft the smartest idea in the room. Here's the thing: Phil was a genius. I'm not a genius, so I need other people to help me do genius things."

In the end, he says, it comes down to BBDO's fervently embraced mantra: The work, the work, the work. "Our boss," Lubars says, "is the work. And it's a very mean and cruel boss who will humiliate you in public if you don't satisfy it. You must please that work and make it feel like you've given it your all. That's what Phil did, and what I'm going to do."