Lee Clow’s Beard

You cannot become the person or agency you wish to be by doing the type of work you wished you never had to do.

The better you get, the less impressed you become by what you can get away with.

After twelve rounds of revisions, most work seems best suited to a media buy of one conference room targeting nine stakeholders.

Even the Mona Lisa starts looking weird if you stare at it long enough. So let’s cut that client review time by 90%, shall we?

You don’t need an insight to be inspired, nor inspiration to be interesting. Concept and craft always carry the load.

The things that give an ad a point of view or bit of panache are always the first to be dismissed as unnecessary. As if having a personality were somehow repellent.

Every good writer and designer has a lecture prepared for a question you thought was rhetorical. Starting with “What difference will it make?”

A certain kind of client is attracted to a certain kind of work. For better and for much, much worse.

It’s amazing how many brands expect to gain a competitive edge wielding the dullest work sixteen rounds of revisions can muster.

It doesn’t matter how hard you claim to push back if you never manage to push anything through.

If what you get to do next depended on what you do now, you’d understand why some creatives are so stubborn. And why more in leadership should be.

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If creativity wins in the marketplace, why is it the first thing surrendered in the boardroom?

We once helped clients see the forest for the trees. Now we bill them for cultivating the weeds.

Nothing turns someone into an audience expert faster than a concept they don’t like.

“We ended up in a good place” is nothing to celebrate when you started somewhere great.

Few marketers possess the power to separate their brands from the competition by using the same words and the same visuals in the same ways as everyone else. And by “few,” I mean none.

The most persuasive case study is a client who stays put.

Too many ads fade from memory before they even fade from view.

Clients who don’t know their role in the creative process are almost always the product of agencies who don’t know theirs.

Optimization without imagination just lets good enough pass for great.