Top 35 Lee Clow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Good advertising is a dialog with people...”

— Lee Clow

2. “Everything a brand does is advertising.”

— Lee Clow

3. “Consumers never complain about ads being too smart.”

— Lee Clow

4. “Baby Steps are for Babies, Not Brands. Be Amazing or Be Surpassed.”

— Lee Clow

5. “Make it smart. Make it beautiful. Have fun.”

— Lee Clow

6. “Most ideas are a bit scary, and if an idea isn’t scary, it’s not an idea at all.”

— Lee Clow

7. “If you’d put it in a Powerpoint deck don’t put it in your ad.”

— Lee Clow

8. “Actions speak louder than meetings.”

— Lee Clow

9. “I found my own way of doing things.”

— Lee Clow

10. “The only reason you should move to a new job is if you are not getting the opportunity to do what you want to do and what you believe you can do.”

— Lee Clow

11. “An ad should be an appetizer, not a buffet.”

— Lee Clow

12. “Creative people are 50% ego and 50% insecurity.”

— Lee Clow

13. “Your ad begins as an interruption. Make paying attention to it feel like a reward.”

— Lee Clow

14. “I’d rather apologize than to be so timid as to never try to do anything smart or brave.”

— Lee Clow

15. “The smartest advertising is the advertising that communicates the best and respects the consumer’s intelligence.”

— Lee Clow

16. “Shocking is easy. Shockingly brilliant, a bit more challenging.”

— Lee Clow

17. “You have to be daring and make something that doesn’t look like anybody else.”

— Lee Clow

18. “Listen real hard to the smartest guy in the room before you go trying to prove how smart you are.”

— Lee Clow

19. “If it’s been done, do it better. If it hasn’t been done, do it so well that better is not an option.”

— Lee Clow

20. “I’ve never found a client’s business problem that could be solved solely through advertising.”

— Lee Clow

21. “Ultimately, if you are doing great work, the money will come.”

— Lee Clow

22. “Creativity thrives on a consistent diet of challenges and opportunities, which are often one and the same.”

— Lee Clow

23. “Throughout history, the technology always comes first. It’s just technology for a while, until the day we artists inherit it.”

— Lee Clow

24. “Most people who are deemed ‘mean’ are usually perfectionist who make mediocre people unhappy, cause they put more pressure on them then they can handle.”

— Lee Clow

25. “An incredible advertising career is not about creating an incredibly amazing ad, it’s about making an incredible amazing ad every single day of your career, it’s about getting those adds killed, and resurrecting them over and over again. It’s about your season average not that occasional home-run.”

— Lee Clow

26. “Telling stories on behalf of brands is what I’ve done all my life.”

— Lee Clow

27. “If you think you have a better mousetrap or car, or shirt, or whatever, you’ve got to tell people...”

— Lee Clow

28. “Managing brands is going to be more and more about trying to manage everything that your company does.”

— Lee Clow

29. “Advertising can be a very frustrating business.”

— Lee Clow

30. “I have always felt the word ‘advertising’ is either a diminutive or derogatory term that kind of goes with stuff people don’t like, and I always felt frustrated because I felt like I was a communication artist or a media artist. The best advertising is one of the art forms of our culture.”

— Lee Clow

31. “When creatively passionate people get together to start a company, the energy and camaraderie is really pretty stimulating.”

— Lee Clow

32. “Hey! You can be more than just a car company. You can be more than just a pet food company. You can aspire to loving dogs, rather than just feeding dogs.”

— Lee Clow

33. “When you open an Apple product it’s like a religious experience.”

— Lee Clow

34. “A thing that most creatives don’t do well is that you’ve gotta learn to listen.”

— Lee Clow

35. “What I’ve always loved to do is build a brand that’s so cool that you want to wear their T-shirt.”

— Lee Clow

36. “If you are always trying to do something great and different and fresh, lots of them are going to be shut down for lots of stupid or good reasons, but you have to keep on trying.”

— Lee Clow

37. “What I know how to do is nurture and help people discover the best opportunities...”

— Lee Clow

38. “Never start a conversation with a yawn.”

— Lee Clow

39. “It’s very demeaning that we have to put on a show to prove that we know how to put on a show.”

— Lee Clow