Dan Burrier

A nine-year-old Dan listens as Ray Bradbury describes a short story at El Camino Community College: ?As the parents walk down the hall to the nursery,? Bradbury says, ?I don?t know what's going to happen. I simply follow
them and watch.? Dan thinks this is somehow a calling to become a novelist; it turns out, in fact, to be an apt description of a career in advertising. (The parents are eaten by lions.)

At 12, Dan plants a cardboard sign in the middle of his parents? newly mown lawn. ?Want your lawn to look like this? Call now.? His first ad. Fast forward. Past the BS in electrical engineering. Past the minor in English literature. (Both at the University of California, San Diego.) Past the uncompleted MA in English at the University of Washington. Time to make money. Dan opens a creative boutique in Seattle. Takes early lumps with clients: Microsoft, Seafirst Bank and Red Hook Ale. Moves to Los Angeles.

Signs with BBDO, working up to group creative director on Apple, Best Western, Ortho and so forth, collecting a Lion, Belding Bowls, Ad Age Best Ad and The One Show Awards. In 1997, Dan takes a call from Rick Boyko and Steve Hayden at Ogilvy, and heeds it, working on IBM, Motorola, Perrier, Cotton, Andersen and MotherNature.com. A few more awards follow. In 2002, Ogilvy asks Dan to take the reins at Ogilvy Los Angeles. Moving vans arrive in Brooklyn and the adventure continues, with incursions into the worlds of fashion, technology, hospitality and kids via Mattel, Kraft, Cisco, ampm, ARCO, BP, Nature Made, The Los Angeles Public Library and Heal the Bay.