Thou Shalt Not Shill: Advertising's New Religion

Advertisings new religion David Lubars, BBDO's new creative director is featured in a meaty interview over at New York magazine.

One word that is big in Lubars’s vocabulary is shill. It gets turned into the noun shilliness, the adjective shilly, and a host of separate verb forms—to shill, to be shilled, to shill at. There is no greater term of contempt to Lubars. Shilliness encompasses a whole host of possible practical and moral failings in advertising—to be untrue, strident, hackneyed, unconvincing, obvious. “Remember the thing in Wayne’s World,” Lubars asks me, “where the guy says, ‘All this commercialism, I can’t stand it, it’s giving me a headache,’ and he’s wearing a Reebok hat and jacket? And the other guy goes, ‘Here, try this—Nuprin: little, better, yellow, different.’ ” Lubars sees his project—sees the project of advertising—as getting beyond little-better-yellow-different. Lubars leans in to make his point: “I’m saying, give the audience something real. Something that’s really entertaining and cool. Something I wouldn’t mind doing for ten minutes of my private life.”

The new creative director of the most prestigious big advertising agency in America is yelling into the telephone, making a case for one of his ads. No, not yelling. Keening is more like it, like a Beat poet who has somehow been trapped for years in button-downs and khakis, pretending to be an executive, and has suddenly been released. He didn’t plan this. He had called planning to talk about new media and old media and how half of America will have broadband by 2006 (“That’s a fact, not some futuristic bullshit”) and how the ad agencies that didn’t get it risked “getting flushed down the twentieth-century toilet.” But somehow, the big theory has fallen by the wayside and we have gotten to talking about a commercial by Fallon, the Minneapolis agency Lubars has just come from. It stars a guy wearing a sweat-stained undershirt under his torn, checkered Pendleton, sitting in a Barcalounger. The spot is supposed to promote Citibank’s identity-protection program; the guy in the Barcalounger has had his identity stolen. He is sprawled on the Barcalounger, holding a beer, but his voice is that of a Long Island teen queen who just spent $1,500 of his money on a leather bustier. But the commercial is not really about identity theft. It is about the guy on the Barcalounger. Advertising’s great comic characters—Wendy’s Clara Peller or FedEx’s fast-talking John Moschitta—are some of the great grotesques of the century. And the guy in the Barcalounger is one of the great grotesques of advertising, a big belch of a comic character. Like all great funny commercials, it’s counterintuitive. It shows a person who’s ugly, funny, and dumb, whose identity (like most of ours) is not really even worth stealing, and asks the viewer to identify with him.


So now David Lubars is trying to dissect how it is that a commercial can do that, and what comes out is, This is gumbo America. “It’s not just telling the truth about the product,” Lubars explains, “but showing an understanding of how things really are, not some glossed-up whatever.”


The reason that David Lubars found himself answering questions about truth and “the way things really are” is that in June, BBDO North America—an agency that Michael Patti, himself a former BBDOer and now creative director of Y&R;, calls “the most American of ad agencies”—announced that at the end of the summer, Lubars would take over as BBDO’s creative director and chairman. Pepsi, General Electric, FedEx: BBDO’s client roster is a list of many of the great prestige accounts in the ad world, big advertisers with a history of high-profile, award-winning commercials.