Lee Clow Lifetime Achievement Award
May 17|2004

Holly shit. This night in itself was worth coming out for the Clios. Let’s work backwards, right now I feel incredible, I feel inspired, I feel different. I just came out of the Lee Clow speech and video.

Well, to my surprise, Lee remembered me! He asked me “How’s the site?”

I told him that after his interview it all started to go downhill but that we managed to keep it under control.

The dining hall was absolutely full with people and there were surfboards designed sponsors like Apple, Corbis and the Clios hanging from the Ceiling.

The Lee Clow video made by TBWA was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen. It showed Lee’s story, and as the bizarre host in the video said, “darn video wouldn’t have been so long if you wouldn’t have had such an godamn interesting life.”

We were taken on his story, how he started in a bowling alley and decided to become an art director. Lee went through many jobs but always worked hard in his little home studio to try to get hired. He even made a campaign with a little bearded dolll he sent out to agencies as his self campaign titled “Hire the Hairy”. Lee’s passionate start at TBWA shown with the incredibly impossible amasing Lee Clow work. Believe me when I tell you that everyone felt very small when seeing this compilation of his work. It’s not like a dozen incredible spots, it’s like hundreds, thousands of them. Lee’s passion with Apple and Steve Jobs was talked about as well as the tough decision they made to lose Porsche in order to get Nissan.

The video made a good point. Lee is not one of us, he’s a Martian. And he came to earth on one of those lifesaver watch houses/spaceships that rest on Venice Beach.

After getting an extremely loud standing ovation, Lee came up and gave an incredible speech about his life. One thing he said was that it was very cool making the campaign for Apple and having to cut and place the type by hand, and cut the commercials with scissors and glue, only to have that same company explode with success and put an end to just that, cutting commercials by hand and placing type manually.

At the end of the day, he said it’s all about passion and people. About the ones who love their business so much they stay late at night and in the weekend to be proud in the morning of the work they did. “Here’s to the crazy ones” he closed.