BBDO's ads often featured celebrities, like Michael J. Fox in the Diet Pepsi advertisement "Apt. 10G" (1987); more than other agencies, BBDO viewed the Super Bowl as its most crucial venue. "Desert Island," for FedEx, first aired during the 2003 Super Bowl.   (Photo: Phillip Toledano)

Among the possible choices to head a big New York agency, Lubars had a number of compelling qualifications. After rising through jobs at Chiat/Day in Los Angeles and the Providence shop Leonard/Monahan (briefly called Leonard Monahan Lubars & Kelly), Lubars had taken the top job at BBDO’s small West Coast office in the mid-nineties. Though he had already built up a relationship with Rosenshine, Lubars left BBDO to take the top creative job at Fallon Worldwide, a midsize agency that, like a number of similar ad agencies (San Francisco’s Goodby, Silverstein, or Wieden + Kennedy, Nike’s Portland shop) whose names tend be prefaced with the words creative, nimble, and, most of all, award-winning, had carved out a niche for itself as a go-to place for clients looking for more innovative fare than the bigger New York or Chicago agencies could deliver. The off-kilter ads that Fallon made under Lubars—such as the Citibank spots—were the opposite of BBDO’s slick extravaganzas.

Lubars’s new-media credentials were also impeccable. Every news report made a point of talking up a special award, the Titanium Lion, given to Fallon at the Cannes advertising festival in 2003, for a series of short films made by bona fide Hollywood directors (Guy Ritchie, John Woo, John Frankenheimer) to promote BMW cars—movies that were distributed over the Internet. BBDO presented Lubars to the world as the guy who was going to lead the New York agency into the brave new scary beautiful world of TV-Internet-telephone-plus-all-the-other-appliances-we–haven’t-yet-thought-of “convergence.” Within the advertising world, Lubars was well regarded by his peers. “To be a creative director requires creativity, leadership, and vision,” says Gerry Graf, a senior BBDO creative director who left last year to take the top creative job at Chiat/Day. “[Lubars] has all of those.”

In the middle of July, I met David Lubars in Minneapolis. At the time, he was shuttling between New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, essentially working for both Fallon and BBDO simultaneously. I already had some idea of what to expect. Lubars had called me just after returning from this year’s Cannes awards. He was as earnest an adman as you’d ever want to meet. Though he has worked on any number of funny commercials, he is not funny in conversation. He can sound, on the contrary, like he is reminding himself to make small talk because he’s been told that making jokes early on will facilitate communication later. (“How was Cannes, David?” “Terrible. Twenty hours of meetings. I. Was so busy. That. I forgot. To look at the beach. To see. If there were any topless women.”)

Lubars said that what he was trying to do in advertising was like what the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper.

In person, Lubars is tall enough that he slouches to compensate, making him always seem ready to burst out of the limited space he is taking up. The cocked eyebrows that can make his face look sinister or skeptical in publicity stills make it expressive up close. He gets impatient easily; making a cell-phone call from an airplane sitting on the runway, he sounds just about ready to demand that the crew let him off right then and there. The impatience, and also a compelling intensity, come out when he is talking—as he often is—about how the rest of the ad industry doesn’t get it. He refers to his general distractedness as “my ADD” and swallows bunches of multicolored vitamins, as if ordinary food were not quite enough to sustain the Lubars pace.

Lubars insists that he does not think of himself as “the savior” of the ad industry, but does it in a way that tends to reinforce the idea that’s exactly what he is. “People ask,” announces Lubars, “ ‘Who’s going to be the savior of this tired old industry?’ To me, it doesn’t need a savior.” When he really gets going, there is a swagger to his language. He will talk up the wonders of new media while slamming the idea that, Internet or no Internet, TiVo or not, everything has changed so completely that a smart advertising guy can’t make it all right. “Technology experts were all saying, ‘We’re the new marketing and these old bloated gasbag traditional TV agencies are going to go away,’ ” Lubars recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I don’t like this, and I don’t believe it.’ There’s been 100-plus years of marketing knowledge. There’s a craft to it, there’s an art to it. You can’t just learn how to do it because you’re on the Internet. But what they’re doing on the Internet, I can learn that.”

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.”