Wieden in The Independent
Interview with our founder, Dan Wieden, in today’s issue of The Independent:
Dan Wieden – ‘The secret of my success is failure and uncertainty’
His
clients include Nike, Coca-Cola and Microsoft. His agency is a global
force. And yet Dan Wieden, the man who coined the phrase "Just Do It",
thrives on chaos. By Ian Burrel
Step into the
London offices of Wieden & Kennedy, one of the world’s most
cutting- edge advertising agencies, and the first thing you see is a
mannequin in a pinstriped suit and buffed shoes, his head replaced with
a kitchen blender and the words "Walk In Stupid Every Morning"
inscribed in pink on his briefcase.
The building in
Spitalfields looks like it has been furnished by fictional Shoreditch
media upstart Nathan Barley (there is a table football game, drum kit
etc), after a trip to the West Coast of America (the office is
decorated with self-portraits of every member of staff). Other
weirdness includes a padded cell for creative thinking on the top floor
and a giant polystyrene statue called Nicola (made by the artist
Wilfrid Wood).
"Blender Man"
embodies the chaotic creative spirit of the agency that Dan Wieden
founded with David Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, in 1982, but the motto
is just one of many slogans found in this strangest of workplaces.
"Fail harder" is another, "Welcome to Optimism" is another.
This is perhaps
understandable when slogans are your business and you have previously
come up with a line of such impact as Nike’s "Just Do It", as Wieden
did.
W&K has grown
with Nike, building one of the greatest global brands and at the same
time expanding its defiantly independent operation to New York, London,
Amsterdam, Tokyo and Shanghai.
This has been
W&K’s extraordinary achievement, to maintain its reputation for
risky, left-field advertising (it was the world’s most-awarded agency
in 2002) whilst maintaining a roster of clients that includes such
giant all-American brands as Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Subaru and Miller
beer.
On a recent visit to
London, Wieden explains the DNA of his unique agency and what he makes
of the advertising industry’s future.
W&K, he says,
still thrives on a culture "built around a friendly relationship with
chaos", a concept represented by Blender Man. "I think it’s important
that if you’re going to be innovative, that there’s not a process for
everything. Sometimes it seems that if you’re never lost you’re never
going to wind up any place new. It’s only if you’re willing to be
completely fucked-up that you’re going to do anything important," says
Wieden, who has a silver beard and a barking ringtone on his mobile
("I’m sorry, I keep a dog in my pocket…")
Yet W&K could
not have maintained long-standing relationships with such global
clients without a high degree of diligence with regard to the financial
side of the business. "There are parts of the agency that operate with
the precision of a German railroad," he says. "We try to be as old
fashioned as humanly possible when it comes to our books. The tracking
of projects, the planning and research is very traditional, very
methodical."
The relationship
with fellow Oregon company Nike has been fundamental. "We’re here
because of Nike. They were a small shoe company and we were four people
trying to buy shoes for our kids. Because of our close relationship, I
think that there’s many of the same gene pool, almost literally the
same gene pool, floating around both companies."
The familiarity and
success of the two businesses does not have to mean the advertising
work is predictable, Wieden claims. "Phil Knight (the Nike founder)
loves, and has always loved, to take risks, and he took risks with us.
That company continues to thrive on throwing out old ideas, embracing
new things and waiting to see what happens."
When Wieden looks
back at how that "Just Do It" end line came about, he admits it was
proposed as nothing more than a "connecting device" to link a group of
eight Nike television commercials. "I hated tag lines, we all did, I
thought they were dumb. So I wrote, like, six things. ‘Just Do It’ was
one of them. I showed it to some folks in the agency and they went ‘Do
you think we need that goddamn thing?’ " says Wieden, who decided the
line should remain. "We just typed it out on typewriters, then blew it
up, and put it on a board. It was not a big deal, seriously. Then when
it actually aired, it surprised everybody involved because it
apparently spoke some truth that was larger than sport or advertising.
There’s no explaining that thing. Nobody understood that it was going
to take off like that."
More recently,
W&K has been better known in the UK for its work with Honda, with
memorable campaigns such as "Cog", where the tiniest parts of a car
interact to set in motion a Honda Accord, and "Choir", in which a group
of singers voiced the sounds of driving a Honda Civic.
Despite some of the
hand-wringing within the advertising industry over a dearth of good
creative work, Wieden, sitting beneath a large "Welcome to Optimism"
banner, remains upbeat. "The industry is probably in the throes of its
most creative revolution in decades. The experimentation that’s going
on is so widespread and so profound that I can’t imagine being bored."
He is especially
thrilled by the "explosive, unpredictable" Chinese market, where
W&K opened an office two years ago. "There’s just an incredible
vibrancy – it’s just like unleashing a lot of fresh eyes on old problems," he says of the emerging Chinese advertising industry.
Wieden did not
immediately appreciate the importance of the interactive world of new
media and is now trying to make up for lost time. "To be honest, we
were very late getting into the interactive thing, but we are
headstrong about it now," he says. "I mean, we were playing around with
interactive, but we were not obsessed with it. We are now obsessed with
it."
Like so many others,
he is not entirely clear "how we can keep doing what we are doing and
make as much money" in the digital arena, yet the chaos and uncertainty
appeals to him.
He says television work is being undermined in terms of finance and creative energy.
"I’m not sure
television is where the most revolutionary work is taking place right
now. Production budgets have shrunk, which should not be a break on
creativity, but there’s not as much psychic energy in television as
there is in the interactive space," he says. "But it’s still an
incredibly magic medium that has the ability to engage you emotionally
in ways that few other mediums do. It’s great for storytelling."
The independence of
W&K, rare in a world of advertising conglomerates, is an essential
part of its DNA. "David Kennedy and I are creative guys. We set out to
create a second-generation independent advertising agency that would
exist long after we were gone. We may have sacrificed a lot of
financial gain, but [independence] has allowed us to make decisions
more freely. We have the ability, when we don’t see eye to eye with a
client, to say ‘It’s not working, what shall we do?’ and not feel like
we have stockholders in the room making that decision for us."
Dan Wieden is an
influential man, named one of America’s top 25 "most intriguing
entrepreneurs". But his success, he says, has come from not
compromising his creative instincts. "In this business, you follow one
of two masters: you either follow the muse or you follow the dollar…"