The three-word, eight-letter tagline, together with Nike’s swoosh emblem is taken into account one of the vital profitable and recognizable within the historical past of promoting, and it happened because the shoe firm was struggling in opposition to formidable rivals comparable to Reebok and Adidas, whose adverts capitalized on the youth-oriented health craze of the Nineteen Eighties.
Mr. Wieden, as soon as an aspiring playwright who grudgingly entered the advert enterprise, had labored for giant corporations earlier than hanging his personal shingle with enterprise associate David Kennedy after studying a e book titled “How to Start an Advertising Agency.”
The founding was on April 1, 1982 — April Fools’ Day — marking an irreverent model that grew to become their hallmark. They saved beer on faucet at their places of work and likewise had a full-scale basketball court docket on the premises, amongst different facilities designed to make work really feel like play. A reporter from the New York Times described the constructing as “a temple of outrageousness.” One of their get together friends, Ken Kesey, creator of the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” reportedly advised the founders, “You could teach the Hells Angels how to party!”
Even daring to launch in Portland was a raffle, with the main advert businesses primarily based in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. “No one in their right mind would start an international agency in Portland, Oregon,” Mr. Wieden mirrored years later.
Nike, a small however rising firm primarily based in close by Beaverton, was their first main consumer. Although Mr. Wieden was hardly a health fanatic — he as soon as tried to jog in a pair of denims, solely to chafe his crotch, he advised the Portland Oregonian — he shared a rebellious spirit with Nike founder Phil Knight, who had launched himself to the duo with the declaration, “I’m Phil Knight, and I hate advertising.”
It took years for Mr. Wieden and Kennedy to realize a foothold within the business, as Nike additionally gave its enterprise to the large Chiat/Day agency to deal with its promoting for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. But Wieden+Kennedy’s advert the following yr — featuring Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground driving a Honda scooter by New York City to the backtrack of his 1972 hit “Walk on the Wild Side,” impressed Knight with its moody depth.
Although scooter gross sales didn’t expertise a serious uptick, Knight started investing vastly extra within the upstart promoting firm. Mr. Wieden and his inventive staff had made adverts for Nike that includes sneakers for several types of sports activities and athletes, however they felt they wanted a unifying slogan to bind all of them collectively. Mr. Wieden, who was at all times fast to credit score teamwork for many successes, mentioned he got here up with “Just Do It” largely on his own.
The idea was inspired by an atypical source: the final words of convicted murder Gary Gilmore, whose 1977 killing by firing squad in a Utah prison was the first execution in the United States after a 10‐year moratorium on the death penalty.
Mr. Wieden said he read Norman Mailer’s acclaimed 1979 book about Gilmore, “The Executioner’s Song,” and remembered that the death-row prisoner was requested if he had any final phrases earlier than being shot. The brazen cheekiness of the response — “Let’s do it!” — caught with him. Scribbling on a pocket book, he wrote, at first “Do It,” later including the “Just.”
The tagline first appeared on a July 1988, TV ad, directed by Kennedy and featuring an 80-year-old man, Walt Stack, who ran 17 miles every morning including over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — aspiring to sell a shoe that could meet the need of everyone regardless of age or fitness level.
“Just do it” quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist as a catchphrase meant to represent living life on your own terms, daring to take chances on and off a playing field. “You wouldn’t believe the response,” Liz Dolan, director of Nike public relations, told The Washington Post in 1989. “We’ve gotten zillions of letters from consumers who’ve told us it’s made them change their lives. One woman left her husband.”
Over the next several decades, Nike sales boomed 1,000 percent, with the “Just Do It” ads featuring prominent athletes such as Michael Jordan and Colin Kaepernick. Wieden+Kennedy was additionally behind the intelligent “Bo Knows” commercials for Nike’s cross-training shoes featuring athlete Bo Jackson and blues-rock guitarist Bo Diddley.
Although Nike remained its biggest client, Wieden+Kennedy also did advertising work for McDonalds, Ford, Coca-Cola, Samsung, ESPN and Uniqlo, among other major firms. The agency, now employing 1,500 people in eight offices worldwide, won multiple awards, including Global Agency of the Year four times from the trade publication Adweek. Mr. Wieden never formally retired but remained active as a trustee, often visiting the Portland headquarters to give encouragement and guidance to new staff.
“The reason it lasted so long was that he didn’t build an ad agency, he built a culture,” senior Wieden+Kennedy executive Karl Lieberman told the Oregonian. “Curious, driven, welcoming and lacking deference, … it’s a place that in a lot of ways reflects him.”
Veteran British promoting govt Alfredo Marcantonio wrote in an electronic mail: “In the sixties, Doyle Dane Bernbach and its fellow New York hotshots ruled the world so far as creative advertising was concerned. They so inspired the likes of London’s Collett Dickenson Pearce that the center of creative excellence crossed the Atlantic. It was Dan Wieden in Portland and also the late Pat Fallon in Minneapolis, far from Madison Avenue, who powered the U.S. to again vie for the international creative crown.
“He was a warm and gentle character, a complete contrast to the top dogs that he spent his career competing against,” Marcantonio added of Mr. Wieden. “No flamboyance, no flannel, no fuss. He just did it.”
Dan Gordon Wieden was born in Portland on March 6, 1945. His father worked his way up to the presidency of Joseph R. Gerber Advertising, one of the region’s biggest firms.
He graduating from the University of Oregon in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. The previous year, he had married fellow student Bonnie Scott and soon began a fitful early career as floor manager for a local TV station and writing marketing copy for the forest‐products company Georgia-Pacific Corp. He said he was fired from the latter because he could barely contain his boredom. He devoted his spare time to studying literature and theater, at one point fancying himself as a budding playwright.
For years, he tried to avoid following in his father’s footsteps, seeing advertising as too conventional a path. But eventually, seeking greater financial security to support his growing family, he joined McCann-Erickson, the biggest ad firm in Portland, and partnered with like-minded colleague Kennedy, who similarly considered himself an outsider in a world of slick or button-down admen. “It was a perfect match of subversives,” the Oregonian wrote: “Wieden, the high-strung, jabbering, radical writer, and Kennedy, the taciturn, philosophical artist.”
Or as Kennedy put it to the New York Times: “Dan had four kids and lived in the country, and I had five kids and wanted to live in the country.”
Both left around 1980 for the William Cain Agency, where Mr. Wieden said he found himself dreading his work for yet another lumber company in the Pacific Northwest. But one client, Nike, fascinated them. Mr. Wieden and Kennedy jumped at the challenge to build a brand for the sports-shoe company lagging far behind its competitors. They quit Cain in 1982 to start their own firm, luring Nike as their sole client.
It has remained an independent agency ever since, despite the multiple takeovers of smaller agencies by international conglomerates in recent years, and is now run by a trust — suggested by Mr. Wieden — to ensure its independence. (Kennedy died in October 2021, at 82.)
Mr. Wieden’s first wife died in 2008. In 2012, he married Priscilla Bernard. She survives, along with four children from his first marriage; three stepchildren; a brother; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.
In the London-based journal Creative Review, Mr. Wieden wrote this recommendation for inventive groups: “Look, if you are driving for excellence, let me suggest you tell your left brain to take a break now and then. And give your right brain permission to let all hell break loose. I am not kidding. … You have to allow disorder and … foster a relationship with anxiety. With unpredictability. … The goal is not to march forward in lock-step harmony. … Excellence is not a formula, excellence is the grand experiment.
“It ain’t mathematics,” he added. “It’s jazz.”