Retired BBDO chairman Phil Dusenberry in his office.   (Photo: Phillip Toledano)

Inside ad-agency executive suites, the notion that those ten minutes of private life are an increasingly valuable commodity has become the central, deeply worrying tenet of the conventional wisdom. Sitting in his office this summer, Lubars’s new boss, Andrew Robertson, preternaturally tan and exuding the kind of boisterous confidence you used to find in dot-com mini-moguls, fired off statistics at me in a practiced and effective routine: Number of channels in the average American home was 14, now 91. Pounds of junk mail every year was 180, now 340. And the amount of time spent with all media has gone up from 60 hours a week to . . . 60 hours a week. The great fear of advertisers is not simply that their audiences want to see ads in some new form. It is that they don’t relate to ads at all. “There’s nothing scarce now about the media. What is scarce now,” says Robertson, “is attention. Consumer attention.”

The Problem of Consumer Attention—the question, that is, of how you get consumers to give you 30 seconds of time, a minute, or even ten minutes in a world of expanding choices and fifteen-second cuts is the obsessive concern of ad agencies today. The dangers on the horizon—technology, the proliferation of media, the hot new creative agencies in places like Miami—multiplied like the Indians coming over the hill. Stories of the rare ad that breaks through the clutter—the more oddball the better—are passed around like Harvard Business School case studies. Had I looked at Subservientchicken.com, Burger King’s Website plugging “chicken your way,” Robertson asked me. He looked at me with surprise and some pity when I told him I hadn’t. “Well, the most important thing about it,” Robertson told me, “is that 100 million people have spent seven and a half minutes each on it.”

In fact, the number of people who’ve looked at Subservientchicken.com is closer to 11 million than 100 million, which only emphasizes the desperation the ad industry feels to find something—anything—new. And that’s where Lubars’s promise comes in. Lubars sometimes refers to the audience as “victims” of advertising. If the problem with advertising, the old advertising, the advertising that played to a captive audience, is that it shills, that it sells too hard, in David Lubars’s world the way to get past consumer indifference is to stop selling. It is not to make advertising but to make entertainment that happens to sell stuff. “The audience is very sophisticated,” he says. “They like marketing, and they’re willing to play the game. But they’re willing to play the game right. ‘Truth. Don’t bullshit me.’ ”

In the most successful ads from Lubars’s tenure at Fallon, the sales pitch can feel snuck in. Often you will not know what is being advertised until the end: Only in the last seconds of the identity-theft commercials do you see the Citibank name. Other commercials look like public-service announcements. And then, of course, there are the BMW films. In Minneapolis, Lubars told me that the BMW films were about “reversing the polarity” of advertising. It is one of the big Lubars themes—if the advertising doesn’t reach the audience, let the audience come to the advertising. On the one hand, they take the age-old approach taken by ad agencies that want to prove their creative chops—hire a big name director, make a mooo-viiiee, not just a commercial. And on the other, of course, they do it online, giving top brass the ability to reassure the clients that they are indeed in this great new world. So they satisfy both the right-brain half of the advertising mind that wants to be taken seriously for the “creative” work and the left-brain half that talks about consumers and technology and marketing communications.

In Lubars’s world the commercial is one extended anecdote, the pitch almost an afterthought. Nothing in the Citibank identity-theft commercials gives away what is being sold until the Citibank logo comes on in the last seconds of the ad. Ads like that essentially invite the audience into a world that has its own logic. They are a chance to entertain or “to show how things really are.” They don’t shill. And so they give voice, in some sense, to every ad guy who has hated his job and every television watcher who has ducked out to get some chips during the commercials. “Selling stuff is not my job,” Lubars told me in New York. “My job is to create a lifelong partnership between brand and consumer. It’s like a marriage. You get married, you make this promise to each other, and then you help each other for the rest of your lives. You do things for each other. My job is to be the connective tissue in that marriage.”

That is the ultimate David Lubars promise. The ad agency’s job isn’t to nag us to buy products but to act as the broker between our trust and the Brand Promise. It’s advertising that, to take a page from another Citibank ad that Fallon made, says thank you. It’s a lovely vision: morning again in the advertising world.

When Lubars and I discussed where to meet in New York, he told me that he had grown up in Brooklyn; I suggested that we meet there. His press guy countered with the Brooklyn Diner, a theme restaurant on 57th Street and Seventh Avenue. You don’t have to be a big-deal French philosopher to notice that the substitution of Brooklyn Diner for Brooklyn reflects some deep-seated simulation-versus-reality issues.

This summer, I sat at Michael’s, the midtown restaurant that is the unofficial club of New York’s media elite and their consiglieri, with Phil Dusenberry. Dusenberry was one of the key figures in the transformation of advertising from what he describes as “the three-martini lunch and eighteen holes of golf and making the clients feel comfortable” to a “big-time creative” endeavor. Inside the little BBDO universe, the talk was of whether Dusenberry had known what was going down with Ted Sann, but Dusenberry himself was more willing to talk about the big-picture history of advertising than the daily play-by-play. He had resigned himself to the idea that the adman’s creative life was finite. “If you want to talk to young people,” Dusenberry told me, “you need young people working on the account.” He had arrived in the Town Car that whisks him between appointments; he was working, he told me, on a documentary of Ronald Reagan’s funeral.

And yet it was on the old subjects of manipulation and persuasion—the brand, the brand, the brand—that Dusenberry remained almost weirdly eloquent. There we were at Michael’s, a place set up in such a way that you can see just about everybody from every table, and Phil Dusenberry, small, well kept, elfin in a blue polo shirt, sat declaiming over his bacon and eggs with his hand over his heart. “Every great advertising campaign has at the heart of it the true essence, the true substance that makes a promise to the consumer, that makes you want to have this brand,” Dusenberry said. “It makes you feel something about the brand. Something good, so that when you’re in the supermarket going down that endless aisle of endless products, you’re reaching for one of them mainly because its advertising has reached you on an emotional level. You don’t think about it intellectually. You don’t think, ‘Is this 5 percent better or 10 percent whiter?’ You’re reaching for it because it made you feel something in here.” He raises his hand to his heart. “It made you feel something good.”