Just Do It

Wieden+Kennedy was founded on April 1st 1982, when Dan Wieden (bizarrely pronounced as WHY-den) and David Kennedy took the Nike account away from the agency they were at at the time, McCann Erickson, and decided to form a new company.  The two met while working on the account in 1980.

Dan Wieden coined "Just Do It" and is therefore now someone who I am desperate to know more about.  There is a documentary in which he is featured called Art & Copy - I will try and get a hold of it this week.

Apart from the consistently excellent work Wieden+Kennedy have been doing with Nike since '82, they've also had some other amazing campaigns. Among them: Old Spice Guy, "Impossible Dream" for Honda, "Where do you want to go today?" for Microsoft, and the GTA-inspired "Coke Side of Life".

W+K is one of the largest independent agencies in the world, which I like about it.  Banks seem to love buying up successful creative businesses.  I don't know what effect it has on ad agencies, but it's one of the worst things to happen to record labels.

Economies of scale come at the cost of human individuality.  I don't believe that's a cost worth paying.

A couple more thoughts to end the blog on:

The ITV ad was apparently done in-house, by ITV Creative.  A couple of days ago they poached Channel 4's deputy network creative director, Phil Lind, who has been with C4 since 2000.  ITV parted ways with BBH in late 2011 and now produce all their creative marketing in-house.

The posters at the below link got a lot of love on Reddit yesterday.  They are indeed, very cool.  I'll have a bit more info on them on tomorrow's blog.

http://imgur.com/a/PdSNB

Später