USA Today carried a feature on Wieden + Kennedy a couple of days ago. You can read it on their site.

Or read the version reproduced below:

THESE GUYS CREATE ADS YOU REMEMBER
By Michael Hiestand

Before they unleashed the line on
America, Dan Wieden and David Kennedy just did it. They were thirtysomethings at
a small ad agency and left with only the small account they worked when they set
up their own shop 25 years ago. Their firm’s telecommunication infrastructure amounted to a
pay phone down the hall from their office. Wieden & Kennedy didn’t have the
start-up capital to get its own phones.

"David and I had children instead of money," says Wieden.
"We thought about raffling them off."

But, says Kennedy, "We couldn’t find any takers."

Lucky for them. Because their agency, some 2,500 miles from
Madison Avenue, took that one local account — Nike — and became the dream
factory that shapes how America sees sports icons such as Tiger Woods, ESPN’s
SportsCenter, John Madden’s video games and LeBron James. Including the
multi-generational LeBron it created for Nike ads.

The agency’s sports orientation can bubble up even when
it’s not specifically selling sports-related products, suggests Hal Curtis, who
helped create some of W&K’s most-memorable Nike ads and now works on
W&K’s ads for Coca-Cola, which included its Super Bowl ads. Says Curtis, on a TV ad that simply focused on the soda
being poured over ice cream in a glass: "For Coke, this is like a Michael Jordan
spot. Sometimes, you’re show something great and just get out of the way."

Or, make an ESPN anchor flop around on a table pretending
he’s roasting bacon in 10 takes.

"I’ve gotten way more attention for those W&K spots
than for anything I’ve done anchoring SportsCenter," says ESPN’s Steve
Levy. He says he’s most-recognized for the spot where he’s
supposedly helping Cincinnati Bengal receiver Chad Johnson come up with new
touchdown dances by wiggling on a table yelling, "sizzling bacon action, baby!" But when people bring up the bacon, says Levy, he tells
them the "This is SportsCenter" campaign isn’t really
SportsCenter: "I try to explain we’re really not that funny, they just
give us funny lines. That’s the genius of Wieden & Kennedy."

Anchors known for ads

ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt says he was skittish about doing
one W&K spot where he had to wear a Captain America outfit "that to say was
snug is an understatement — it was bordering on the obscene." But he knows the
power of the ads: "It’s funny that people I run into inevitably talk about the
ads. I wonder if anybody understands we actually anchor shows."

The SportsCenter ads have enough cache that athletes
appear in them without being paid. But W&K also creates spots where there’s plenty at
stake. Curtis recalls LeBron James, who got an estimated $90
million Nike deal when he was still a teenager, coming to W&K to see how
he’d play several generations of himself in the now-famous Nike ads. "We were saying, ‘Now, here’s the old LeBron’ and all the
rest," says Curtis. "No response to any of it. Finally, we’re done and he didn’t
move for maybe 30 seconds. Then, he just says, ‘I like it.’ "

Even by the usual eccentricities of the ad world, W&K’s
story isn’t the stuff of spreadsheets and flow charts. "How in the hell did the independent global ad agency get
going?" asks Wieden. "By a bunch of renegade hippies who couldn’t get a
job."

‘They just get it’

Katie Lacey, an ESPN senior vice president for marketing,
says "for sports, there’s no one better than W&K. They just get it." She’s not exactly sure why. She cites the agency having stayed independent while the ad
industry consolidated into a handful of giant holding companies. "Or maybe it’s from being in Portland and away from New
York, or big-city, bias," she says. "Or, maybe it’s some sort of culture
instilled by the founders."

Kennedy’s father worked in Oklahoma’s oil fields. But
Wieden got to know the ad business early because his father worked in it: "I
thought he was involved in one of the most whorish businesses on earth. Then I
realized you can have a lot of fun and make a lot of money." Just not necessarily right away. Wieden was in corporate PR
for a Portland lumber company — "I was sort of the corporate hippie burning
incense at my desk," he says — and Kennedy had worked in a big agency in
Chicago. When they cast their lot with Nike in 1982, the
sneaker-maker was spending under $1 million on ads and didn’t believe in using
TV. Today, Nike spends more than $300 million globally. But,
says Wieden, then they "were a bunch of jocks making shoes and selling them to
their friends. They were talking to their buds. They didn’t want anything that
looked like marketing. It forced us to drop the craft we knew. Now, we wondered,
how do you share things instead of try to manipulate?" It also helped to come across Michael Jordan, and not just
for Air Jordan.

Jim Riswold, who worked with Curtis on Nike ads such as "Bo
Knows" and Charles Barkley’s "I Am Not a Role Model," has cited Michael Jordan
being cast alongside Spike Lee as the bike messenger Mars Blackmon as an ad
breakthrough. Nike, however, isn’t always wedded to W&K. It recently
took some of its running shoe marketing away from W&K, the third time it
taken work elsewhere. In each instance, the value of the re-assignments were
estimated to be worth less than $15 million annually — while W&K’s total
annual revenues top $1.4 billion. But Nike, says Wieden, "is extraordinarily gifted in
keeping us awake."

Keeping up with the news

Wieden seems sincere when he says his "favorite organism is
the slime mold spore." They have to get to light to propagate, so they form a
"worm-like object" to create a sort of mass migration — "its individuals working
together to solve a problem." Wieden also says he think his staffers "should walk in
stupid every day" to avoid formulaic thinking. And be nimble. Instant W&K work included a Nike ad spun off the Don
Imus flap — "thank you for unintentionally moving women’s sports forward" — and
a spot shown in Japan heralding Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka’s debut
— "enjoy the pressure."

After Tiger Woods nailed a long putt in the final round of
his 2005 win in The Masters — and a CBS closeup caught the Nike swoosh as the
putt lipped in — W&K produced an impromptu ad with a light touch: "We gave
you a ball with more control and you didn’t center the logo."

Kennedy is largely retired from the daily grind. Wieden says he doesn’t know when he’ll step down. He says
he’s not hanging around for the fame — "David and I are loners and would rather
not be in the public eye" — or because he loves consumerism — "I don’t like
shopping." Instead, he says, "the bitch is that it’s too damn
interesting. You’re pulling back the covers on great institutions." And, as Kennedy suggested at W&K’s recent 25th
anniversary party, it’s not like the co-founders have ever worked off a master
plan: "Twenty-five years? I didn’t think we’d last 25 days."