A mix of Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, the self-effacing co-founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy considered his success a “cosmic joke.”
It all started 40 years ago over a card table in a dingy basement office, with a pay phone down the hall and a single client: the upstart athletic shoe company Nike, run by Phil Knight, who declared from the outset, “I don’t believe in advertising.”
By the time Dan Wieden, the co-founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, died on Sept. 30 at 77, that company, which he built with David F. Kennedy, had become an industry-shaking giant, with a roster of Fortune 500 clients and a lasting legacy from its work for Nike.
The agency said the cause of Mr. Wieden’s death, at his home in Portland, Ore, was complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.
The most notable product of the agency’s association with Nike was a tagline written by Mr. Wieden that became one of the most famous in advertising history: “Just do it.”
That line, debuting in 1988 and remaining ubiquitous to this day, “captured the world’s imagination and propelled Nike to new heights,” Mr. Knight wrote in a statement published in Ad Age magazine after Mr. Wieden’s death.
Beyond putting a message behind Nike’s swoosh logo, the agency has spun out widely hailed campaigns that were often as counterintuitive as they were memorable. In 1985 it lured Lou Reed, in most circumstances the epitome of an anti-commercial artist, to hawk Honda scooters to the sound of one of his signature songs, “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Its “High Life Man” spots for Miller beer, directed by the deadly serious Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris, poked cheeky fun at manly pretensions in more than 100 installments, starting in 1998. Its “Imported From Detroit” campaign for the Chrysler 200, starring Eminem, was a hit when broadcast during the 2011 Super Bowl and made “8 Mile”-style urban grit seem both glamorous and otherworldly. Last year’s “Famous Orders” campaign for McDonald’s made the icily cool rap star Travis Scott appear as kid-friendly as a Happy Meal.
ESPN, a client for 25 years, would scarcely seem like ESPN without its 400-plus installments of Wieden+Kennedy’s “This Is SportsCenter” promo spots, which featured a stream of sports megastars deadpanning their way through droll comedy sketches set at the network’s drab offices in Bristol, Conn., as if they were guest stars on “Saturday Night Live.”
All this from an agency — an independent one in an industry dominated by conglomerates — called by its own executives “an island of misfit toys,” and all this from a self-effacing family man given to flannel shirts and Buddhist philosophy who was also a prank-loving maverick.
“Dan had two sides, the Norman Rockwell side and the Andy Warhol side,” his wife, Priscilla Bernard Wieden, said in a phone interview.
In Mr. Wieden’s advertising philosophy, rules were meant to be broken. “Excellence is not a formula,” he once said. “Excellence is the grand experiment. It ain’t mathematics, it’s jazz.”
Dan Gordon Wieden was born in Portland on March 6, 1945, the oldest of three children of Duane and Violet (Maxfield) Wieden. His father, known as Duke, was an ad man, too, and became president of Gerber Advertising in Portland; his mother stayed home with the children.
After graduating from Grant High School, Mr. Wieden enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he met Bonnie Scott. They married in 1966. (She died in 2008.)
He had dreams of becoming a playwright or an actor, but he decided to major in journalism. After earning his degree, he took a stab at public relations before deciding to focus his powers of prose in his father’s business.
He worked as an advertising copywriter in the Portland office of the agency then known as McCann-Erickson, where he met his future business partner, Mr. Kennedy, who was an art director. (Mr. Kennedy died of heart failure a year ago.)
The duo soon left for a new agency, William Cain, one of whose clients was the third part of a future advertising trinity: Mr. Knight, who owned a fledgling shoemaker based in nearby Beaverton, Ore. Feeling restless, Mr. Wieden and Mr. Kennedy decided to break away and hang their own shingle, with a $500 investment from each partner, a borrowed typewriter and a book titled “How to Start an Advertising Agency” as a guide.
Wieden+Kennedy opened for business on April Fools’ Day, 1982. The choice of date was intentional, and an appropriate one for an agency whose triumph Mr. Wieden would later describe as a “cosmic joke.”
“We’re an advertising agency with a success story that makes no sense whatsoever,” he said in a 2016 speech. With only four employees at first, “we started in the most ridiculous place you possibly could” — Portland, a small city a continent removed from Madison Avenue. “The only people that would ever consider moving to Portland,” he said, “were people that had been fired everywhere, or just kids right out of school.”
They did have one promising client, however: Nike, which had left William Cain but was still largely focusing its marketing on joggers in the pages of Runner’s World magazine. Before long, Mr. Knight would lose his professed hatred for advertising.
By the 1980s, this storied collaboration would produce the heralded “Bo Knows” campaign, showing a lighter side of Bo Jackson, then a groundbreaking (and fearsome) player of both major league baseball and pro football.
“Mars and Mike,” from the same year, captured Michael Jordan at the peak of his powers and featured the filmmaker Spike Lee, reprising his motormouth Mars Blackmon character from his 1986 film, “She’s Gotta Have It,” grilling the Chicago Bulls basketball titan about whether his superhuman abilities were a result of his Air Jordan sneakers.
As the agency’s creative leader, Mr. Wieden continued to write copy. While he was generally resistant to old-school taglines, colleagues said, he produced a monster of one in 1988: “Just do it.” Both brand-specific and open-ended, the tagline reinforced the pitch that Nike was a no-compromise brand built for achievement, but it was also adopted as a self-empowerment mantra in the culture at large.
In typically impish fashion, Mr. Wieden later admitted that the phrase was inspired in part by the Utah spree killer Gary Gilmore, whose last words before he was killed by a firing squad in 1977 were “Let’s do it.”
“I like the ‘do it’ part of it,” Mr. Wieden recalled in “Art & Copy,” a 2009 documentary directed by Doug Pray. “None of us really paid that much attention. We thought: ‘Yeah, that’d work.’”
Agency culture, built around the concept that Mr. Wieden and Mr. Kennedy called “hire wrong,” was every bit as swashbuckling. Lacking access to the same pool of seasoned talent as big-city agencies, the two “just had to hire interesting people with interesting perspectives and mash them all together,” Karl Lieberman, the agency’s global chief creative officer, said by phone.
Life around the office, which included a basketball court and beer on tap, was a preview of the headquarters-as-madhouse ethos soon to dominate Silicon Valley. Mr. Wieden, colleagues said, liked to tell the story of the time that Ken Kesey, the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” exclaimed at a company party, “You could teach the Hells Angels how to party.” (As the mastermind of the famous LSD-laced “acid test” parties of the 1960s, whose participants included that notorious motorcycle gang and the Grateful Dead, Mr. Kesey knew whereof he spoke.)
Mr. Wieden’s management style was laced with gonzo as well. “He was never the ‘big guy,’” said Susan Hoffman, the creative head of the agency’s London office, who worked with Mr. Wieden for four decades, going back to his pre-Wieden+Kennedy days. “He always had a crazy sense of humor and naughtiness. At William Cain, he used to steal my shoes in the office and hide them. One time, I couldn’t find them and had to go home barefoot.”
While Mr. Wieden had his playful side, he was anything but a softy. Once, after the agency had worked tirelessly on a pitch for a client, “nothing was landing” during a presentation meeting in New York, Mr. Lieberman recalled. “The clients were rolling their eyes,” he said.
During the pitch, one client passed a note to another, which Mr. Lieberman caught a glimpse of. “Are they serious with this?” it read, with a few obscenities added for effect.
“As everyone was packing up and leaving,” Mr. Lieberman said, “Dan stood up and said, ‘This work is great, and you’re out of your minds if you don’t like it,’” adding a choice obscenity of his own.
“The man was consistently so damn nice and so kind,” Mr. Lieberman said. “But if someone ever got out of line, he never hesitated to pulverize them.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Wieden is survived by his daughters, Cassie Wieden, Tami Wiedensmith and Laura Wieden Blatner, and his son, Bryan, all from his first marriage; two stepsons, Nathan Bernard and Sean Oswill; a stepdaughter, Bree Oswill; a brother, Ken; a sister, Sherrie; and 12 grandchildren.
His most enduring client, Mr. Knight, admitted in his Ad Age tribute that his famous line about hating advertising had been misinterpreted over the years.
“What I really meant was that I hated traditional advertising, where Joe Jock says, ‘Smoke Lucky Strike because I do,’ or ‘Drink X Cola like I do,’” Mr. Knight wrote.
“Dan Wieden,” he said, “interpreted me before I interpreted me.”
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