Spike Lee was recently feted at an ad industry event and honored with a lifetime achievement award for corporate brand-building. But building the brand known as Spike Lee may have been his biggest accomplishment.

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when the idea of the Air Jordan --- the extravagantly colored Nike sneaker bearing the name of a certain bald basketball hero --- was a novel, audacious idea. (Michael Jordan initially scoffed at the idea of wearing the shoes, saying they'd make him look like a clown, and the NBA went so far as to ban them. ) That reaction by the league --- and some iconic TV ads directed by Lee --- helped make Michael Jordan and Nike totems of countercultural cool. (Jordan and Nike as upstarts thumbing their noses at the corporate status quo? That was clearly a long time ago.)

So too it is with Lee. We take his ubiquity --- hollering at the opposing team at Knicks games, public speaking, weighing in on the political issues of the day, and yes, directing provocative films --- as a given, as if that stuff is par for the course for temperamental indie film directors whose movies are not all that lucrative. But Lee has remained part of the cultural conversation because of shrewd self-promotion, and it all started with those Nike ads, in which he played the fast-talking, pushy basketball fan Mars Blackmon alongside Jordan.



Those early commercials helped transform the struggling film director into a media mainstay complete with his own catchphrase. ("It's gotta be the shoes!") "I can't define [my brand]," Lee said at the event. "But I knew early on, I'd have to create some kind of persona behind my name, because companies weren't going to spend millions of dollars to promote my films... Do The Right Thing opened same day as Batman... We can't take out full page ads in The New York Times the same day Batman opens... so we had to do other stuff."

Lee has complained that he still struggles to get funding for his film projects, despite the success of 2006's Inside Man, his biggest box office hit. (He's still keeping busy with ad work, most recently for MSNBC's "Lean Forward" campaign.) Which makes you wonder if Lee's built his persona --- the irascible, perpetually aggrieved perfectionist who's hard to work with --- a little too well.