Lee Clow

If you don’t know who Lee Chow is you should. He is the brains behind Apple’s 1984 commercial. Well this evening he was invited to speak to a lucky group of students at the University of Colorado and it was a moving experience to say the least.

Here are some of the more memorable things he had to say:

“The best advertising tells stories”

“If you never fuck up, your not taking enough risks”

“Everything is the brand from packaging to interactions with employees to everything”

“Brands are media”

“Think of a brand as a person with personality a sense of humor, someone you would want to grab a beer with”

Here are some of my favorite ads that Clow was involved with:

Building Communities Around Brands

Richard Rosenblatt – co-founder of iMall which he sold for $565 million to Exite,  former CEO of Intermix Media which created MySpace, amongst other notable online endeavors (all this as a precursor to why his opinions matter), offered this interesting prediction for 2009 about how people will rally around brands in online communities:

Taken from Demand Media Official Blog:

“People will build communities around brands – 2009 is the year for this to emerge as a new and viable advertising model. We all identify ourselves with where we shop – for food, shoes, deals, etc. – and I think that each of us will be given a real opportunity to find a like-minded community within these online experiences – not just for promotions. If you are a gardener or gardening enthusiast, you can join a community focused on gardening at Scotts.com; or, into healthy eating, join the community emerging at Whole Foods. What about brands like Restoration Hardware? Gap?”