"What? You mean Lee Clow isn't tweeting all hours of the day, surely you jest?" We all knew this already, but lets get to know Jason Fox a little better shall we? DB:"Ad-celeb" twitter accounts was a bit of a trend for a while, but they were "BogusBogusky" and dead admen like Paul Arden, what made you chose to be the beard of Lee Clow? Jason Fox: When I started LCB, I was actually quite unaware of the "dead ad guy" trend. Or maybe that trend really hit after LCB started in April 2009. I have three small kids, so timelines tend to get quite jangled in my brain. I was aware of @bogusbogusky, which turned out to be Bob Knorpp's doing. I discovered his account about an hour after registering @bogusalex, which is still around – although I tweet there maybe twice a year. Seems a bit anticlimactic now that Alex is off saving the world from carbon lovers like myself. Anyway. After my initial plans of satirizing advertising were mildly thwarted, I decided to try a different tact. Maybe doing something with a little less pure snark and a bit more inspiration. I didn't want to just swipe someone's identity, but I did want to have the voice come from someone or something that would at least have a reason for sounding smart. So I narrowed it down to anthropomorphizing either Lee's beard or Jeff Goodby's ponytail (my own white-boy 'fro just wouldn't cut it). Since beards denote wisdom, Lee's beard won. Originally, the account was to be a mishmash of ad nuggets along with things an actual beard might tweet, but that direction ran out of steam rather quickly and before few people started following. DB: You were being very secretive about who you really were behind that beard for a while, were you ever worried that impersonating someones beard might get you in trouble? Jason Fox: I never thought I'd get in any real trouble. At worst, I thought Lee or someone at Chiat would tell me to just knock it off. Instead, Rob Schwartz invited me to lunch with him and Lee. And then Lee tossed out the idea of doing a book.
Surreal
Not at all.
“The tweets were somewhat of a mystery,” said Lee Clow. “It was all stuff I would have said – advertising and life truisms – stuff I hear all the time from clients and people in the industry. When I found out it was Jason I wanted to meet him. One thing led to another and we decided to make a book.”
