Wieden + Kennedy

International Directory of Company Histories, Volume 75 (2004) by Carrie Rothburd

Wieden Kennedy

224 NW 13th Avenue Portland, Oregon 97209 U.S.A. Telephone: (503) 937-7000 Fax: (503) 937-8000 Web site: http://www.wk.com

Private Company Incorporated: 1982 Employees: 523 Gross Billings: $875 million (2004 est.) NAIC: 541810 Advertising Agencies; 541830 Media Buying Agencies; 541850 Display Advertising; 541870 Advertising Material Distribution Services; 541890 Other Services Related to Advertising

Wieden Kennedy (W K) is one of the largest independent advertising companies in the world. Best known for the NIKE slogan, "Just Do It," the company's other high-profile clients have included Coca-Cola, ESPN, Subaru, Avon, and America Online. Wieden Kennedy's offices are located in Portland, New York, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Wieden Kennedy also has launched "12," a school that offers 13 months of hands-on experience for aspiring advertising professionals.

1982–94: From Relative Obscurity to Wide Acclamation

Dan Wieden and David Kennedy opened their independent advertising agency, Wieden Kennedy, on April 1, 1982. Wieden was the son of F.D. "Duke" Wieden, the former chairman of the Gerber agency in Portland, Oregon, a man greatly admired for his passion for advertising and for his craft as an ad man. The younger Wieden originally had intended to pursue a career in writing and attended the University of Oregon, earning a degree in journalism in 1967. After experimenting briefly with writing screenplays and short stories, however, he went to work at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency in Portland, Oregon.

Dan Wieden met David Kennedy in 1980 at McCann-Erickson. At the time, Kennedy's career in advertising was more extensive than Wieden's and included having worked for Leo Burnett and Young & Rubicam in Chicago. Like Wieden, Kennedy had a dislike for status quo advertising. He held a degree in fine art from the University of Colorado at Boulder and had "spent the '60s not telling anyone what [he] did for a living," according to a 1992 Advertising Age article. The pair began to work together at McCann on the NIKE account in 1980. Two years later, they left to create their own ad agency, taking with them their one client at McCann, NIKE. With a card table, borrowed typewriter, and pay phone, they opened Wieden Kennedy in the basement of a Portland labor union hall.

Portland-based NIKE was still small and relatively unknown in the early 1980s. Company lore recounts that when Phil Knight met with Wieden and Kennedy for the first time, he told them, "I hate advertising." Wieden and Kennedy did not design NIKE's trademark "swoosh"; they did break new ground in advertising throughout the 1980s, however, by injecting irreverent humor, sophisticated film techniques, and hip cultural references into their ads for the shoe manufacturer. The firm put Lou Reed in a Honda commercial, used the Beatles' "Revolution" as an insurrectionist version of a jingle for NIKE in 1987, and introduced a cinematic, storytelling approach to print and television ads. Although NIKE moved most of its account to California-based Chiat/Day in 1983 in anticipation of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, it returned to W K in 1985. In 1988, Wieden coined the phrase, "Just Do It," which almost instantly won fame for both NIKE and W K.

As the agency grew, Wieden and Kennedy spent less time on the creative aspects of their business. From 1988 onward, the team did not produce many ads, but instead oversaw the work of staffers. For Wieden, the shift was welcome. "I get very excited about other people's work. I don't have a huge need to do hands-on work," he said in 1990 in Advertising Age . The change was harder for Kennedy. "It's been extremely frustrating for me. I'm basically a creative type, but I found myself sitting in more meetings than doing ads," he said in 1993 in Advertising Age .

Growth continued for W K throughout the early 1990s, but that growth was not steady. In 1991, Advertising Age chose W K as its Agency of the Year, the same year W K won a substantial account with Subaru of America and opened an office in Philadelphia to serve its new client. With the addition of Subaru, the agency's billings rose 65 percent to $165 million. W K did not fit easily into the Philadelphia community, however, which was more staid than that of Portland. When in 1993 Subaru fired the agency, W K closed its Philadelphia office. Earlier that same year, having experienced total losses of about $11 million in billings during a six-month period, it imposed austerity measures on upper management and instituted layoffs for the first time in its 11-year history, reducing its staff by about 15 people and reducing its Portland staff by 10 percent.

1995–2000: A Period of Tremendous Change