The Family Business

BBDO North America Chief Creative Officer David Lubars (CGS’78, COM’80) will address graduating students at this year’s convocation for COM bachelor’s candidates on Friday, May 17, 9 a.m., at Agganis Arena. Later that day, UN Secretary-General for Global Communications, Department of Global Communications Melissa Fleming (COM’89) will speak to COM master’s candidates at 3 p.m. at Walter Brown Arena. Lubars recently spoke with COM about his days as an advertising student and the legacy of AdLab.

Before Walter Lubars founded AdLab in 1974 and became dean of COM, he worked on creative teams at top ad agencies like Doyle Dane Bernbach. His son, David Lubars, remembers accompanying his father to the office as a child. “It seemed like a really cool way to make a living,” recalls the younger Lubars (CGS’78, COM’80).

But when David enrolled at BU, where his father was by then teaching, he hesitated to pursue advertising. “Because it was ‘my dad’s thing,’ I tried other things first,” he says. “I started as a history major, but I didn’t see myself doing that. I liked writing, so I went into journalism. That was fun. But then I saw what they were doing across the hall in AdLab, and that was so interesting. I went over there, and I never looked back.”

Today, he is chief creative officer at BBDO Worldwide—one of the premier agencies in the world, with offices in more than 80 countries—and chair of BBDO North America. He’s led award-winning work, such as the Snickers “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. He traces his success back to AdLab, where he was a creative director and worked on a “Great American Smokeout” campaign to encourage people to quit smoking. “I just knew that’s what I wanted to do,” he says.

As a student participating in AdLab, Lubars could see his father had started something special. “It’s run as a real ad agency,” he says. “You learn pressure and deadlines and having to go back and do it all over again. So, when you start at an agency, you already understand the frantic and sometimes chaotic nature of the business. It’s experience that is so valuable.”

Back then, advertising ran in print or on television or radio. “You had to figure out what kind of creative to put in those boxes.” But Lubars is invigorated by the rapid evolution the industry has seen in the past couple of decades. “The thing that’s exciting about the business today is it’s so changing—the mediums come and go, and it’s kind of like a cloudy mess,” he says. “Every day, you wake up to something new. I like that, trying to figure out the new.”

AdLab continues to prepare students to meet those challenges, he says. “AdLab is still in a category of one—there’s nothing else like it. And my dad created all of that. It was quite brilliant, what he did.”