Ad industry titan Dan Wieden’s legacy is how to find and cultivate cre

The advertising industry lost one of its icons with the death of Wieden+Kennedy co-founder Dan Wieden on September 30 at the age of 77.

As I wrote last October when David Kennedy, co-founder of the Wieden agency, died at the age of 82, if there was a Mount Rushmore of American advertising, both Wiedens undoubtedly and Kennedy would be there. Sure, Wieden invented Just Do It, but the Portland, Oregon agency they founded has spent the last four decades producing iconic ads and campaigns for Nike, Honda, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, ESPN, and many others create important brands. This has made W+K the world’s largest independent advertising network with offices around the world and more than 1,500 employees.

What makes the agency’s story even more compelling is that scale was never really the goal, but rather the result of a separate goal. Wieden didn’t want to build a huge advertising agency, but a place where creative people of all stripes, he says, can do the best work of their lives.

A big part of Wieden+Kennedy’s origin story is that the agency couldn’t compete for advertising talent with big agencies in places like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles because they refused to leave Portland. So they weren’t specifically looking for promotional talent. They just wanted creative people who could apply their ideas to branding issues. Wieden believed the agency was successful not despite its location and non-traditional talent pool, but because of it.

The advertising industry is virtually unrecognizable from where Wieden started his career and built his company. Our fragmented media landscape no longer offers brands and advertisers just a handful of options to break into pop culture. Instead, it’s a 24-hour firefighter of content from all directions that endlessly demands our attention.

Now creatives like Hallie Tut and Estée Lalonde are using tools like YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok and more as new launch pads for creative branding. Then there’s the appeal of technology platforms that attract creative minds that may have migrated to the adland in previous generations. Even within the industry, agencies are now competing for the best and brightest with – and within – giant public companies, global consultancies, and the brands and technology platforms themselves.

As the industry continues to mourn the loss of one of its modern day legends, where will the next Dan Wieden come from and what path could they take?

Vann Graves is Executive Director at VCU Brandcenter, a portfolio school that Wieden once served as founding director. Graves readily admits that the advertising industry doesn’t create icons like it used to. “It’s not that we don’t need them, but I don’t think there’s time for that,” says Graves. “You don’t know anymore who did that Super Bowl commercial because the way we work has changed, the business has changed and the way we do it has changed.”

For Michael Leibowitz, founder of the award-winning independent agency Big Spaceship, he recognized an advertising challenge during a recent visit to the Virgil Abloh exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. “If he grew up in advertising instead of architecture, I don’t know if he would have had such a massive cultural impact,” says Leibowitz, who founded his agency almost 23 years ago. “When I ask myself why this is so, I think that for whatever reason it is [the ad industry’s] Silos seem incredibly rigid. What I love about Dan is that he nurtured an organization that maintained a balance between accommodating misfits and oddballs – and a standard of excellence. That is far too rare.”

The advertising industry has long struggled to attract and support a diverse pool of talent and, just as important, to find ways for that talent to become industry leaders. One need look no further than Walter Geer’s Black Madison Avenue discussion last March to see that there is much more progress to be made.

Of course, there is a long list of programs, internships and initiatives across the advertising industry with exactly this goal: to discover, nurture and develop talent. Formal schools for ad portfolios like VCU Brandcenter are just one notable way. Others include programs like One School, which provides affordable access and education for emerging black creatives, and Ryan Reynolds’ Creative Ladder, which launched last summer as a 501(c)(3) organization for interested students and emerging talent from marginalized communities Marketing, advertising, design and commercial production.

Wieden himself has spent his entire career building a pipeline to answer that very question. In fact, he aligned his entire company towards this goal. Caldera, the arts organization he founded in 1996, began as a summer camp and has grown into a pipeline of creative talent and opportunity in and of itself.

The next Wieden may not come from the walls of W+K, but the agency has made an effort to maintain a structure that could make it possible. In 2004, it set an industry precedent with a six-month, paid Creative Accelerator program (referred to as The Kennedys since 2011) that sought talent from diverse, non-traditional backgrounds, taught students the fundamentals of its business, and commissioned them with real client projects . Charity Pourhabib, W+K Brand Manager, launched ADMagic in 2021 to provide HBCU students access to advertising careers. Last summer, W+K partnered with the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at Long Island University, with a course on how culture is made, and this year launched a new paid residency program in New York called Rotate to give attendees experience at multiple creative companies.

Even beyond formal programs, the agency is simply always on the lookout. Back in 2020 after reading about NBA podcasters and tweeting @NBABubbleLife The Los Angeles Times, the agency offered Tray Edwards and Drew Ruiz jobs in the New York office. Edwards is now part of the agency’s social creative studio Bodega, and Ruiz is a creative whose recent work includes a new collaboration with McDonald’s Cactus Plant Flea Market.

W+K CEO Neal Arthur says that despite increasing competition, they find that people still really want to be part of a creative culture and community. “They also see the opportunities we can offer at scale,” says Arthur. “Of course someone like MrBeast has no need to go to an advertising agency, but for many people the opportunity to work with brands like Nike, McDonald’s and co [AB InBev] at this scale is still very appealing.”

Another important component of Wieden’s influence was his dedication and belief in independence. In fact, in 2015 all of the company’s shares went into a trust to ensure it always stays that way. Wieden said at an industry meeting at the time, “We’ll die before we sell.” It’s a potentially thorny statement in an industry dominated by global, publicly traded conglomerates, but the path to continuing Wieden’s legacy doesn’t go through their doors. Every future advertising legend will gush out of, or create, an independent agency, and there are certainly many attempts. Arthur says it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain creative ideals when you’re part of a larger public company. “You’re committed to shareholders and analysts, so instead of staying true to your vision, you’re suddenly following the trends of where the business is going,” he says.

Leibowitz agrees. He says there’s still plenty of room to experiment out there if you have the stability, security, and capital to do it — and enough independence to want to do it. “What does the world actually need and where can we cover it? I think the world needs less advertising and more creativity,” he says. “Dan understood. The work they do and how they find talent in the spaces they wanted to play in, like the social studio (bodega), that’s smart. It’s not just creative, it’s good business.”

To reflect on where and when the next generation of advertising talent and entrepreneurs might emerge, Paul Venables says it’s important to remember Wieden’s own journey. Venables founded his own independent agency, Venables, Bell & Partners, in 2001. “He didn’t come from an exciting trend, a hot category, a new technology, or even an interesting part of the country,” says Venables Wieden, who begins writing ad copy for a lumber company. “Where Dan came from was pretty ordinary. The path is not meaningful; the mindset is. The next Dan Wieden will come from a place of fearless creativity, with just enough confidence to believe he can and will do better.”

Arthur agrees that this isn’t about a specific path. “I have no idea how brands will connect with culture 10 years from now, but I do know that creativity and creative culture will be at the core,” says Arthur. “That’s always been at the heart of Dan’s cause, and it’s still true.”