Advertising: 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 Burrell
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..."
