Lee Clow Quotes

101 Lee Clow Quotes

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We met with Steve Jobs every week, I didn’t even see the CEO’s in most of our clients. We see chief marketing officers…
Lee Clow

You gotta care about everything the brand does…
Lee Clow

Everything a brand does is an ad.
Lee Clow

I believe a brand that articulates itself well and interestingly and creatively and has some to say, will create all the conversation they could possibly want.
Lee Clow

I guess I’m an ad guy. I’ve been at it so long that that’s, I guess, the moniker.
Lee Clow

I found my way into advertising because I loved… the art of communication.
Lee Clow

Advertising has such a… damning definition…
Lee Clow

[In 2007] The world has evolved to a place where brands that need to speak to their audience have to understand that everything they do is media. Everything that they do is telling their story. It’s not as simple as it used to be.
Lee Clow

Everything a brand does is a message…
Lee Clow

[In 2007] I think ultimately brands are going to become media.
Lee Clow



Creative people are 50% ego and 50% insecurity. They need to be constantly told they’re good and they’re loved.
Lee Clow

[In 2007] I often over the years have said we’re in the Rodney Dangerfield business.
Lee Clow

[In 2007] We have to figure out a way to get paid for our ideas, own some of our ideas in perpetuity.
Lee Clow

As long as we succeed, you succeed. It’s a very simple model.
Lee Clow

The Monday after ‘1984,’ there were lots of agency types who basically said, ‘That's the most irresponsible commercial that was ever done. They didn't even show the product. Apple's in big trouble with IBM. How did the board of directors allow that to be run? What kind of stupid people would run a commercial three months... oh, you know, three weeks before you can even buy the product?’ So it comes with being daring that you're going to f *ck up sometimes. But I'd rather apologize than to be so timid as to not to try and do anything smart or brave.
Lee Clow

[In 1987] Maybe good news doesn’t sell papers.
Lee Clow

[In 1987] We can do better than all that wallpaper that you see on TV every night.
Lee Clow

[In 1997 on Apple] I want to recapture the tenacity and the uniqueness of this company and this brand.
Lee Clow

[In 2007 on consumers creating commercials.] Is part of this brave new world we live in.
Lee Clow

It’s an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences.
Lee Clow



[On advertising] An uplifting social force, as a way not only to persuade but to inspire and entertain.
Lee Clow

If you don’t act sure of yourself, it’s very easy for other people’s faith in your product to get shaky. Apple’s 1984 commercial, for example, was an idea that was very easy to get nervous about. If it seems that you have some misgivings or second thoughts about something, it’s easy for people who are less tuned into creative communication to get nervous about it. Most ideas are a bit scary, and if an idea isn’t scary, it’s not an idea at all.
Lee Clow

[On Volkswagen advertising] Single greatest advertising work in the history of the business.
Lee Clow

If you think you have a better mousetrap or car, or shirt, or whatever, you’ve got to tell people, and I don’t think that has to be done with trickery, or insults, or by talking down to people. I think it can be an honest dialog with the consumer. Good advertising is a dialog with people… The smartest advertising is the advertising that communicates the best and respects the consumer’s intelligence. It’s advertising that lets them bring something to the communication process, as opposed to some of the more validly criticized work in our profession in which they try to grind the benefits of a soap or cake mix into a poor housewife’s head by repeating it 37 times in 30 seconds.
Lee Clow

Six months before we know about Mac, we had this new ad that read, ‘Why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ It explained Apple’s philosophy and purpose – that people, not just government and big corporations, should run technology. If computers aren’t to take over lives, they have to be accessible.
Lee Clow

[On some competitors’ negative reactions to the 1984 commercial.] It was all this horsesh*t from people who didn’t have the balls to produce something like 1984.
Lee Clow

[On not selling the 60 second spot ordered by John Sculley only the 30 second one and thereby launching the ‘1984’ advert for the Apple Macintosh.] We told them that we couldn’t sell the sixty-second slot, though in truth we didn’t try.
Lee Clow

[On the suggestion of using Steve Jobs voice to do the voiceover for the ‘Think Different’ Apple advert.] This will be really powerful to have it in your voice. It will be a way to reclaim the brand. [Steve’s final decision after much soul searching ‘If we use my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me. It’s not. It’s about Apple.’]
Lee Clow

[On Steve Jobs] From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he wants his brand to have on people.
Lee Clow

[On a debate with Steve Jobs on the blue in one of the adverts.] I finally proved to him that the blue was the blue was the blue.
Lee Clow



[On Steve Jobs saying an ad had been completely destroyed with the minor changes he had requested.] He discovered we had cut two extra frames, something so fleeting it was nearly impossible to notice. But he wanted to be sure that an image hit at the exact moment as a beat of the music, and he was totally right.
Lee Clow

[On the Apple Stores] In one of our marketing meetings just as the stores were opening, Steve made us spend a half hour deciding what hue of gray the restroom signs should be.
Lee Clow

[To Steve Jobs quietly in his office after he had belittled someone publicly.] When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating. [‘It’s simply who I am.’ – Steve Jobs]
Lee Clow

How we get paid in this business has always been one of my big frustrations.
Lee Clow

We still are treated ultimately as vendors.
Lee Clow

[On their relationship with the Apple brand.] From day one we cared about everything the brand did. We cared about packaging, we cared about TV ads, we cared about print ads, we cared about how products were displayed in stores…
Lee Clow

[On Steve Jobs.] I said damn, he’s right again.
Lee Clow

Every product was a statement of who Apple was and what it cared about.
Lee Clow

Our job is to connect brands with people.
Lee Clow

Everything is media.
Lee Clow



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