Dan Wieden, the copywriter who hatched the “Just Do It” tagline in 1988 for Nike was in Australia this week with a sobering and, paradoxically, optimistic message for adland.
The co-founder of the revered Portland, Oregon-based Wieden+Kennedy, still one of the hottest ad agencies on the planet, delivered a wake-up call on Thursday at a sellout lunch in Sydney: he says the money grab by startups in advertising and tech is destroying the quality and effectiveness of advertising work and the industry has to break its legacy with traditional media and communications. Not abandon it, he says, but broaden. Fast.
And so fierce is Wieden and his 12 partners about their agency remaining independent from the big five multinational communications conglomerates that they have rolled their shareholding into a trust which blocks any future acquisition, in perpetuity.
“We'll die before we sell,” he told the room at the CommsCouncil leadership forum lunch today (19 March).
“It's fucking hard to keep a creative organisation creative … What we need to be is a creative organisation – we don't need to become a financial origination. Because if your first, most import thing is money – then you'll run a typical business based income numbers that come into the shop. If you’re actually a creative organisation you’re going to judge the creative that is being put out. We voted to become a creative organisation not a financial organisation. Money serves creative rather than creativity serving money.”
Speaking to AdNews ahead of the event, Wieden said: “At our place it’s not about the money, it’s about the work, it’s about the culture” said the 70 year-old advertising legend. “We make fine money, we are very happy but there is something that just eats me when young agencies decide to sell out for the money and then a handful of people walk off with a ton of cash. The culture of those agencies are very often destroyed. It’s something I wouldn’t want to be a part of.”
Wieden is in Sydney this week as Chairman of Judges for the creative industry’s AWARD awards program - a coup which took two years after Communications Council chairman and Droga5 CEO Sudeep Gohil - a former W+K staffer - invited Mr Wieden.
Wieden says much of adland is struggling to reinvent itself to embrace the new digital environment.
“It’s a really interesting time and I think there is a huge anxiety that runs through traditional advertising agencies, and clients for that matter, with the opening of the digital world. It offers so many new ways of attacking issues and creating relationships with consumers but it is very new to the advertising business. I know we have struggled quite a bit there. In the beginning when we were hiring digital people left, right and centre, we didn’t really know what to do with them. They loved the culture but left.
“It’s a bit early yet to tell the press what is exactly happening but we’ve got some amazing things coming up so we’re feeling a lot more positive.”
That’s a pretty big call for a man renowned for his understated style but he puts the trigger for a digital savvy W+K down to Colleen DeCourcy, a digital executive the agency hired two years ago to help turn the hot ad shop into a hot digital and advertising shop.
Wieden warns the stonethrowers that ad agencies are not dead if they can adapt properly to the proliferation of digital channels. Data is important, channels are important but more than ever they demand creative people who can create content that is deeply provocative and engaging, he says.
“The art of story telling goes so deep and it’s so important in creating relationships it is never going to go away,” he says. “People still buy novels. To say some of the traditional approaches to creating relationships are over is just completely stupid. The stories just have to carry across different channels. I wouldn’t speak for other people but for us what is important is to do whatever we have to to create powerful and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers. That’s the flag we fly under.”
A version of this story first appeared in the 20 March print edition of AdNews.
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