How David Lubars transformed traditional ad agency BBDO North America into a new media juggernaut.

In a culture where advertisers cry out for consumer attention in every medium and on every surface imaginable (do we really need those commercial-looping TVs above the john in the men’s room?), the omnipresent pitches are enough to make a person don a tinfoil hat.

Sure, the clever spot here or the gratuitous ad there will entertain, but even then, consumers often fail to make a connection between the pitch and the product. Call it the, “What Was That Ad For?” phenomena.

The clock was ticking on magician David Blaine as he attempted to escape from this suspended trap in time to make it to Target’s two-day sale. The multimedia BBDO campaign resulted in a spike of 3 million hits on Target’s Web site and an increase in sales of nearly 6%, an all-time high.

Take BBDO’s campaign for M&M’s. Colorful TV spots reveal what everyday people would look like if transformed into M&M characters. The ads also serve as an invitation to consumers: join in the fun at BecomeanMM.com and create your own “Inner M” avatar. Within three weeks of the ads airing, more than 2 million people did just that.

BBDO enjoyed similar successes when it invited consumers to become an HBO Voyeur, watch the Gillette Young Guns race, witness magician David Blaine perform an escape for Target, indulge in “One Second Theater” with GE, or see an ordinary street light turn into a giraffe to promote the San Francisco Zoo. By creating non-traditional multi-platform content and events and using traditional media to invite consumers to those events, BBDO struck gold. Shoot, a leading branded content production magazine, confirmed as much when it unanimously named BBDO its 2007 “Agency of the Year.”

David Lubars, BBDO North America chairman and chief creative officer, uses an analogy to describe the innovative approach that’s changing people’s perceptions about advertising and turning the industry on its head: “I’ve always felt that the best guest is the one who is welcome. If you show up in someone’s home unannounced and you’re intruding on them, you’ll annoy them and they won’t like you. When advertisers intrude on consumers, how are they helping people fall in love with a brand? I always want to be the guest that’s invited into your home. Not only that, I want people to come to the parties I’m throwing on behalf of my clients.”

The anatomy of a campaign
Not long ago, BBDO stood as the undisputed king of traditional advertising, with big commercials featuring big stars in big productions for the biggest clients. But at the turn of the millennium, as consumers began spending more time on the Web, fast forwarding through commercials courtesy of Tivo, and getting lost in video game worlds, the Big, Big, Big model began to lose its luster.

Scene from BBDO’s One Second Theater and Imagination Theater campaigns for GE.

Scene from BBDO’s Monster campaign. Pajama-clad people race uphill with mirrors, umbrellas, and even a satellite dish in hand in a vain effort to stop the sun from rising. “Don’t fight Monday,” Monster tells viewers.

“If I said to you, ‘The kid can see dead people,’ you would know exactly what movie I’m talking about even though it came out almost 10 years ago,” Lubars explained. “You can see how that simple idea, the reductionist nugget, spawned an entire two-hour piece. And that’s what we want to do for our clients—strip away all of the artifice to get down to a core, shiny nugget. Because from that nugget we can create what seem to be complicated TotalWork pieces. But they’re based on such a simple, clear idea, that it’s easy for us to launch into new, unexplored territories.”

With HBO, the reductionist nugget was simple: We’re great storytellers. From that seed, BBDO spawned a multi-media campaign that didn’t just tell consumers HBO knew how to spin a yarn, it showed them. Taking a page directly from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” BBDO put consumers in Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair and allowed them to peer in on the lives of people in a fictional apartment building.

Through TV spots and a massive life-size video projected onto the side of a Manhattan apartment building, BBDO invited consumers to the HBO Web site where they could become voyeurs and watch the lives of 30 tenants in a dozen dwellings unfold through more than three hours of content. Those with the voyeur-jones could also access exclusive content on their cell phones and a movie, “The Watcher,” on HBO On Demand.

Based on site traffic and a major boost in subscribers, the campaign was a success for HBO and a clear demonstration of BBDO’s successful transformation from a traditional advertising agency into a new-media leader. It’s a transformation that has brought with it record-setting results. Working with his partner Andrew Robertson, BBDO Worldwide president and CEO, Lubars and his team have added more than $1 billion in new business each year since 2005, the first full year under Lubars’s North American leadership. And with big names such as AT&T, Best Buy, Monster, and New Balance signing with BBDO this past year, it doesn’t look like the trend will end anytime soon.

Whatever the future may bring, Lubars makes one thing abundantly clear: BBDO will continue to do things differently. “You can’t make ads an intrusion, culture pollution you just can’t stand,” he said. “Unfortunately, there will always be ads that annoy people, but with the quality of talent we have throughout all our offices, I can guarantee you BBDO won’t be making them.”