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.

A unique product saddled with a generic voice is still just another wallpaper brand.

Potential clients claiming to want great work should have no hesitation explaining how they treated the last people they hired to create it.

Clients who think problem/solution ads are “too negative” are themselves a problem with only one solution.

Great advertising is 100% about the product and 100% about the audience. The math may be funny, but it’s still fundamental.

“Now we don’t have to hire people who make us look and sound smart” is most often said by brands who never did.

Flee the agency that values your efficiency over the work’s efficacy. Unless that’s the only type of agency you ever want to work for.

Too many agencies have chosen to sell tactics as hedges against what could happen instead of creating work that helps brands make something happen.

No project management platform yet devised can hold a candle to one good traffic person.

When you present your solutions as suggestions, you’re asking clients to believe in something you apparently do not.

A lot of agencies claim to “drive sales overnight while building brands over time,” but the great ones know building the brand at every chance leads to sales over the long haul.

The point of cultivating a brand’s look and feel is so it always looks distinct and feels relevant. Yet another obvious truth rarely heeded.

Craft is not a nice-to-have. It is not something to worry about later. It is never an accidental bonus. Craft must be trained, honed, rewarded, and insisted upon. Craft is what separates a “what if” from an “oh wow.”

When a marketer says “that sounds good,” it’s often because it sounds familiar. The alleged goodness comes from comfort, not contrast. So it may be great at getting approved, but terrible at grabbing attention.

May you always be the right kind of irritating.

Dearest Client, If you want us to solve a problem, we will. If you want us to solve it the same way you would if you could, we won’t. Love, LCB

Whether change is good or bad depends on if it’s followed by the word “order.”

Imagine how nice agency life could be if we did the hard work of making sure things aren’t harder than they should be.

Templates make it easy to scale output. If only the same were true of interest.

It doesn’t matter if you can make it fit if it shouldn’t be there to begin with.

If you can describe a client as a cash cow, chances are your people feel like sacrificial lambs.