Dan Wieden, publicist for Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, dies at 77

It all started 40 years ago on a folding table in a dingy basement office, with a pay phone in the hallway and a single customer: the new Nike athletic shoe company, run by Phil Knight, who declared from the beginning: “I don’t believe in advertising”.

By the time Dan Wieden, co-founder of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency, died on September 30 at the age of 77, this company, which he built with David F. Kennedy, had grown into an industry giant, with a Fortune client list. 500 and a long legacy of work for Nike.

The agency said the cause of Wieden’s death, at his home in Portland, Oregon, was complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.

The most notable product of the agency’s association with Nike was a slogan written by Wieden that has become one of the most famous in advertising history: “Just do it.” [Apenas faça].

That line, launched in 1988 and which has remained ubiquitous to this day, “captured the world’s imagination and propelled Nike to new heights,” Knight wrote in a statement published in Ad Age magazine after Wieden’s death.

In addition to putting a message behind the Nike logo, the agency produced widely praised campaigns that were often as counterintuitive as they were memorable. In 1985, he lured Lou Reed, in most circumstances the epitome of an anti-commercial artist, to sell Honda scooters to one of his best-known songs, “Walk on the Wild Side.”

His “High Life Man” commercials for Miller beer, directed by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, mocked manly pretensions in more than 100 episodes starting in 1998. The “Imported From Detroit” campaign for the Chrysler 200, starring Eminem was a hit when broadcast during the 2011 Super Bowl and made the urban style of “8 Mile” look glamorous and otherworldly. Last year’s “Famous Orders” campaign for McDonald’s made rap star Travis Scott look as good for kids as a Happy Meal.

ESPN, a customer of 25 years, would hardly look like ESPN without its more than 400 episodes of Wieden+Kennedy’s “This Is SportsCenter” promotional ads, which featured a series of sports megastars cracking jokes in sketch comedy set in drab offices. network in Bristol (Connecticut) as if they were guest stars on “Saturday Night Live”.

All this by an independent agency – in an industry dominated by conglomerates – called by its own executives “an island of misfit toys”, and all this by a modest family man, adept at flannel shirts and Buddhist philosophy, who also liked to play pranks.

“Dan had two sides, the Norman Rockwell side and the Andy Warhol side,” his wife, Priscilla Bernard Wieden, said in a telephone interview.

In Wieden’s advertising philosophy, rules had to be broken. “Excellence is not a formula,” he once said. “Excellence is the great experiment. It’s not math, it’s jazz.”

Dan Gordon Wieden was born in Portland on March 6, 1945, the eldest of three children born to Duane and Violet (Maxfield) Wieden. His father, known as Duke, was also a publicist and became president of Gerber Advertising in Portland; his mother took care of the house and the children.

After graduating from Grant High School, Wieden enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he met Bonnie Scott. They were married in 1966. (She died in 2008.)

He dreamed of being a playwright or an actor, but decided to major in journalism. After graduation, he experimented with public relations before deciding to focus his prose powers on his father’s company.

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, Kennedy, who was an art director. (Kennedy died of heart failure a year ago.)

The duo soon left for a new agency, William Cain, which had as a client the third part of a future advertising trinity: Knight, owner of a new shoe factory near Beaverton, Oregon. Restless, Wieden and Kennedy decided to split up and start their own business, with an investment of $500 from each partner, a borrowed typewriter and a book entitled “How to Start an Advertising Agency” as a guide.

Wieden+Kennedy opened its doors on April Fools’ Day 1982. The choice of date was intentional and appropriate for an agency whose triumph Wieden would later describe as a “cosmic joke.”

“We’re an advertising agency with a success story that doesn’t make any sense,” he said in a 2016 speech. With just four employees at the start, “we started in the most ridiculous place possible” –Portland, a small town on a continent away from Madison Avenue. “The only people who would think about moving to Portland,” he said, “were people who were laid off from everywhere, or kids just out of school.”

However, they had one promising customer: Nike, which had left William Cain but still focused its marketing on runners in Runner’s World magazine. Before long, Knight would lose his open hatred of publicity.

In the 1980s, this celebrated collaboration would produce the “Bo Knows” campaign. [Bo sabe]showing a lighter side of Bo Jackson, then an innovative (and fearsome) player in both major league baseball and professional football.

The same year’s “Mars and Mike” captured Michael Jordan at the height of his powers and featured filmmaker Spike Lee, reprising his character Mars Blackmon from the 1986 film “She’s Gotta Have It,” questioning the Chicago basketball star. Bulls about whether his superhuman abilities were a result of his Air Jordan sneakers.

As the agency’s creative lead, Wieden continued to write texts. Though he generally resisted old-school slogans, according to colleagues, he produced a monster in 1988: “Just do it.” [Apenas faça]. Both brand-specific and open-ended, the slogan reinforced the argument that Nike was a no-compromise brand, built for achievement, but it was also embraced as a mantra of self-empowerment in the culture at large.

In typically mischievous fashion, Wieden later admitted that the phrase was inspired in part by Utah assassin Gary Gilmore, whose last words before he was killed by a firing squad in 1977 were “Let’s do this”.

“I like the ‘doing’ part,” Wieden recalled in “Art & Copy,” a 2009 documentary directed by Doug Pray. “None of us really paid that much attention. We thought, ‘Yeah, this is going to work.’

The agency’s culture, built around what Wieden and Kennedy called “hire the wrong,” was one of bravado. Without access to the same pool of experienced talent as agencies in big cities, the two “just had to hire interesting people with interesting perspectives and bring them all together,” Karl Lieberman, the agency’s global creative director, said over the phone.

Life around the office, which included a basketball court and beer on tap, was a preview of the “headquarters as a madhouse” morale that would soon dominate Silicon Valley. Wieden, colleagues said, liked to tell the story of the time when Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” exclaimed at a company party, “You could teach the Hells Angels to party.” (As the mastermind of the famous LSD “acid test” parties of the 1960s, whose attendees included that notorious biker gang and the Grateful Dead, Kesey knew what he was talking about.)

Wieden’s management style was also prone to exaggeration. “He was never the ‘big guy,'” said Susan Hoffman, creative head of the agency’s London office, who has worked with Wieden for four decades, going back to his pre-Wieden+Kennedy days. “He always had a wacky, mischievous sense of humor. 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 come home barefoot.”

While Wieden had his playful side, he was anything but an idiot. Once, after the agency worked tirelessly on a presentation for a client, “nothing was knocking” during a presentation meeting in New York, Lieberman recalled. “Customers rolled their eyes,” he said.

During the presentation, one customer passed a note to another, which Lieberman caught a glimpse of. “Are they serious?” it said, with a few obscenities added for effect.

“While everyone else was packing up to leave,” Lieberman said, “Dan stood up and said, ‘This job is great, and if you don’t like it, you’re crazy,'” adding a favorite obscenity.

“The man was consistently so nice and kind,” Lieberman said. “But if someone got out of line, he didn’t hesitate to spray them.”

In addition to his wife, Wieden is survived by daughters Cassie Wieden, Tami Wiedensmith and Laura Wieden Blatner, and a son, Bryan, all from his first marriage; brother Ken; Sister Sherrie; and 12 grandchildren.

His most enduring client, 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 So-and-so says, ‘Smoke Lucky Strike because I like it,’ or ‘Drink X Cola like I do,'” Knight wrote.

“Dan Wieden,” he said, “played me before I played myself.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves