New Delhi: If you could tap into an advertising copywriter’s fantasies, you’d likely find them dreaming of coining a line as iconic and timeless as Nike’s ‘Just Do It’. Inspired by the last words of a killer facing an execution squad, the three words elevated the brand’s identity and served as a rallying command to consumers.
The American ad legend behind that tagline, Dan Wieden, passed away peacefully in his hometown of Oregon in Portland on 30 September at the age of 77, almost a year to the day after the death of his business partner David F. Kennedy, co-founder of their ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.
Wieden’s death marks the closing of a chapter in Wieden+Kennedy’s story, which began when the copywriter met art director Kennedy at the Portland office of the ad giant McCann-Erickson and the pair decided they’d like to do things their own way. They ended up redefining advertising in America.
On April Fool’s Day in 1982, they broke ranks from New York’s Madison Avenue, the nerve centre of the American advertising industry, and started an independent agency out of a warehouse, raring to “blow the cover off this advertising thing”. Their first client was a sneaker start-up called Nike.
Wieden+Kennedy remains independent to this day, and before his death, Wieden reportedly transferred the ownership to a trust so it could stay that way.
Also read: Vicco — brand that made Ayurveda mainstream with its ‘nahi cosmetic’ jingle
‘Temple of outrageousness’
When Wieden+Kennedy was launched, it aimed to disrupt advertising, to change the industry’s culture, and to let creativity thrive. When it started, the agency, as is widely reported, used a card table as a desk and a payphone down the hall, but today it has a global presence and a culture where the dictum “fail hard” is a guiding principle.
“That’s just not in Portland, Oregon. It’s in New York and it’s in Europe and it’s in Asia, South America and India,” Wieden had said in a 2016 interview with the magazine Ad Age “If you go into any one of our offices, you will find there is something going on that is very similar. I don’t know how that happens, but there’s a sense of freedom and really a stretch just to do something wonderful.”
Right from the outset, Wieden+Kennedy functioned in unconventional ways.
The New York Times Magazine described the agency as “a temple of outrageousness” in an October 1991 article on the madness that was the pitching process for the Japanese carmaker Subaru.
The story describes how about a dozen agencies were pitching for this account. Among them, Wieden+Kennedy got off to a lousy start and initially came across as disorganised and unprepared. So much so that Wieden apparently guffawed nervously and explained that “we don’t do presentations a lot”. But, their out-of-the-box ideas aimed at less affluent consumers trumped the packaging and the company won the account.
The TV ads showed footage of cars being assembled in a factory with a narrator declaring that if a car “improves your standing with the neighbours, then you live among snobs with distorted values”. The print ads proclaimed that in bumper-to-bumper traffic, a Subaru “goes just as fast as a much more expensive car”.
From the beginning, Wieden and Kennedy ensured that their ‘disruptive work’ was not limited to rhetoric. The agency famously hired people who typically didn’t belong to the world of advertising.
Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of the San Francisco-based ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, recalled what it was like working with Wieden in the initial days of Wieden+Kennedy: “We were like teenagers planning a party with our parents gone, and Wieden was talking like the guy who had the fake ID.”
Goodby further described how Wieden helped countless professionals realise the true potential of their creativity. “If it was in there, he got it out of you. And he did it with love. For Wieden, it was always about other people,” he wrote in an article for Ad Age.
With Wieden’s death, an outpouring of tributes on social media celebrated these very attributes.
Wanted to give a shout out to this man—Dan Wieden. His vision to take a chance on 12 extremely creative individuals & me (for some reason) changed the trajectory of both my career & my life. I can’t express enough gratitude to Dan, Dave, Jim Riswold, 12.9, & everyone I met at W+K pic.twitter.com/9j9hkochZf
— Vince Largoza (@theycallmevince) October 1, 2022
Ayesha Ghosh, president, W+K India, told ThePrint: “Even if many of us who are presently in W+K India hadn’t met Dan Wieden, this office is founded on all he and David Kennedy held dear. There never has and never will be a rulebook for the way W+K operates, yet there is definitely a W+K way.”
She added that this “way” included the ability to “walk in stupid” rather than to assume knowledge.
“In the words of Dan Wieden, ‘when you don’t know, you try desperately to find out. But the minute you think you know, the minute you go — oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel — you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead’. I believe the best work this office has created, has been a product of this attitude,” Ghosh said.
While Wieden’s work for Nike is his best known, other campaigns also became classics of American advertising. He was the brain behind Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’, and SportsCentre’s ‘If You Could Let mM Play”.
Over the years, Wieden received a multitude of awards, including the prestigious Lion of St. Mark at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the President’s Award from Design and Art Direction (D&AD).
He has been inducted into the One Club Hall of Fame, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame.
Just Do It
‘Just Do It’ is perhaps the most popular brand tagline in the world, an anthem, a part of global lingo.
A good tagline is one that’s simple, memorable and unrestrictive. ‘Just Do It’ is all that and more, and Nike has created numerous award-winning ads on its legs.
The first ad featured 80-year-old San Francisco running icon Walt Stack.
Even agitators who burnt Nike shoes following an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick — a football quarterback who refused to stand for the American national anthem in order to protest police brutality — used the line.
Wieden told the story of how he came up with the line in a 2009 documentary, Art and Copy. It came to him a night before a big presentation to Nike in 1987, with the unlikely source being an article that Wieden had read about a convicted murderer, Gary Gilmore, who reportedly told the firing squad for his execution, “Let’s do it.”
It wasn’t met with cheers and applause as one might imagine, but apprehension and shrugged shoulders. But Wieden pressed on, and in effect not only cracked a good campaign but managed to school a generation of advertisers.
For the journalism graduate who was fired from his first job for being a “hippie”, unconventionality became his main calling card — along with his doggedness.
A case in point is Wieden’s answer when carmaker Subaru asked agencies how they knew something was the best it could be. Wieden, quoting author William Faulkner, said that if he ever expressed precisely what he wanted to express, he would “break my pencil” and die. The rider: “Faulkner died with an unbroken pencil.” So, perhaps, did Wieden.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
This article has been updated to attribute the quote from Wieden +Kennedy India to its president Ayesha Ghosh.
Also read: ‘Kya aapke toothpaste mein namak hai?’ — Colgate ad that gave one of the most recalled taglines