Fallon's work during Lubar's reign made a point of not looking like advertising. Above, a still from one of the short films for BMW (2002); below, a still from the recent Citibank identity-protection series.   (Photo: Phillip Toledano)

Some days earlier, Lubars had called to quiz me about other people I was interviewing. He’d heard that I had called Phil Dusenberry and BBDO New York vice-chairman Charlie Miesmer. This struck Lubars as a waste, or at least a misuse, of time. In Lubars’s view, the story—the real story—was about the future of the media. “When I see you’re calling Phil Dusenberry, or Charlie Miesmer, I wonder where you’re going,” Lubars told me. “They don’t know about this stuff. This is what I’m coming to teach them.”

It’s easy to see the ascendancy of David Lubars at BBDO in exactly these terms: new versus old. Many observers have even mistaken it for the battle of creative Light against musty Darkness. Fallon, the agency that BBDO recruited Lubars from, looks the way an ad agency is supposed to look, the way it looks in Fast Company. There is a small indoor basketball court and, in one office, a mini shooting gallery with Osama bin Laden targets. (Red rock-’em-sock-’em America meets Blue funky-ad-agency America.) Instead of cubicles, there are “curvicles,” and the whole place is creative in that no-right-angles kind of way, complete with gewgaws like foosball tables and binoculars affording an expansive view of the beautiful, jagged landscape of Minneapolis’s abandoned factory districts. Everybody looks simultaneously creative and athletic, and generally appears capable not only of writing but of appearing in a commercial for upscale youth-oriented products.

BBDO, on the other hand, looks, as Gerry Graf puts it, like an insurance company. Its corporate structure is almost comically opaque; BBDO North America is part of a worldwide ad-agency holding company called BBDO Worldwide, which is the biggest part of a still bigger holding company called (cue ominous music) Omnicom. No longer located on Madison Avenue, it is now headquartered instead in the UBS building on Sixth Avenue, a place whose one whimsical touch is a set of slightly creepy 40-foot-tall nutcrackers that guard the entrance at Christmastime. BBDO’s industry reputation for vicious intra-office politics is so widespread that BBDO executives feel compelled to offer unprompted denials—which actually manage to reinforce it. “You’ve heard that we have a reputation as being contentious and competitive,” says Charlie Miesmer, who has worked at BBDO for 35 years and is close to Ted Sann. “That’s because we’re hard on people who come here with big reputations and don’t live up to them.”

But in one key sense, the similarities between the 68-year-old Dusenberry and the 45-year-old Lubars—a guy who urges you to listen to the Brian Jonestown Massacre (“Keeping music evil,” according to the BJM’s Website)—are greater than the differences. Lubars himself often casts the difference between him and other senior advertising execs in generational terms. “They’re 65, they don’t need to figure out this new world. I’m 45, I can’t afford not to.” And yet both Lubars and Dusenberry represent the great conviction of American advertising, that certainty in the elusive Brand Essence—that great striving for reality and sensitivity and authenticity that makes Heineken proclaim that it is “true” and Coke throw up cinéma vérité spots telling you it is “real.”

Consider two recent Fallon ads. The first, nominated for an Emmy (yes, there is an Emmy for advertising), is wordless. It consists of a charming if saccharine cartoon showing a man dressing up in a suit and getting on a plane for a job interview, worrying about his mismatched shoes. At the end, the United Airlines logo appears on the screen. It’s a campaign that Lubars loves. “It’s beautiful, it’s emotional, it’s sentimental,” he says. “That won’t win awards, but I love that campaign.”

The second is for Subway restaurants. Subway’s newest spokesperson, the 12-year-old, formerly overweight Cody, is filmed in soft focus, talking about how much it sucked to be fat. “When my brother would have friends over, I’d stay up in my room,” Cody says, “afraid they’d call me fat or something. I’m Cody. I’m 12 years old.” More scenes of Cody running around trees and creeks. Finally the message, as Jared Fogle, Subway’s weight-loss-marvel spokesperson, comes onscreen clutching a pair of his own huge pre-weight-loss pants. Voice-over: “More than anything, we want your children to live long and healthy lives.”

Really? What about selling chicken-teriyaki sandwiches? It’s as if the business of Subway is selling sandwiches but the essence of Subway is caring about your children. The business of United is flying planes and staying out of bankruptcy, but the essence of United is caring about your stupid job interview. “My job,” says Lubars, “is to bring out the magic and power of the brand.” The magic, the power of the soda, the insurance plan, the sleek silver car (surely that has a spirit!), the . . . the animating spirit of the branded beverage?!

The hottest ad agency in the country right now is probably Crispin Porter Bogusky, a Miami outfit that does work for Ikea, Burger King, and BMW’s Mini—and, as it happens, is the agency that put together Subservientchicken.com. Now, in the ad world, “hottest” means a number of things. Crispin Porter’s reputation rests in part on the sheer craziness of its ads. There is a certain school of advertising—BBDO’s own commercial for Pepsi Twist, for example—where the humor depends on a last bit that “undermines” expectations. It has, so to speak, a punch line. But one of the things that makes CPB’s commercials so popular with cognoscenti is that the whole commercial is the punch line. The Burger King commercial starts with the guy sniffing his attractive co-worker’s discarded Whopper wrapper and devolves from there.