Wieden+Kennedy looks to continue expanding globally while retaining its irreverent Oregon attitude.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
RICHARD READ
The Oregonian Staff

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – In this hub of art and trade, Wieden+Kennedy creatives are settling into lavish canal-side quarters. A rooftop terrace resembles a broad deck at the ad agency’s mother ship in Portland’s Pearl District. Dogs snooze beneath desks, their calm masking the tumult of a management shake-up that rocked the Dutch office.

In London, Wieden+Kennedy staffers cram into a former textile factory. Its lobby features a mannequin in a suit, a kitchen blender substituting for his head. The slogan on his briefcase, “Walk in Stupid Every Morning,” underplays the office’s conversion from the company’s black sheep to winner of the global Nokia account, leading the agency’s international growth.

Back in the Portland headquarters, Buddhist academic rock star Robert Thurman, father of actress Uma, propounds on his latest book about the Dalai Lama. Outsiders make up most of the rapt audience; ad writers are too busy hanging onto key Nike accounts they lost to a competitor, then regained.

Wieden+Kennedy, the defiantly independent ad company that Nike catapulted to success, has reached a tipping point after venturing abroad in cautious steps for 16 years. Almost half its annual revenue of about $165 million now comes from outside the United States.

As the foreign share grows, managers face a challenge in an already turbulent industry: Can W+K export its edgy, irreverent Oregon approach to India, South America and beyond while beating back conglomerates to retain accounts back home?

(W+K Shanghai)

W+K’s global chief operating officer, David Luhr, strives to appear unfazed as he skirts construction workers in the Amsterdam office. The tall 53-year-old — sporting stylishly clipped hair and a turtleneck and pants in de rigueur gray and black — barely avoids ushering a reporter into a room overflowing with proprietary information.

“It’s a little rough,” acknowledges Luhr, sinking into an easy chair in an unadorned conference room. “But welcome to advertising.”

Amsterdam

(W+K Amsterdam)

The tagline for the blog of Wieden+Kennedy’s Amsterdam office says it all: “150 people, 25 nationalities. What could possibly go wrong?”

But last winter, something did go wrong: Executives won’t give details, but a managing director left. A creative director quit. Others were fired.

Luhr, who normally commutes from Lake Oswego to the Portland headquarters, spent months living in an Amsterdam apartment, running the office and restructuring operations. He replaced players in W+K’s customary satellite-office troika: two executive creative directors and a managing director.

Amsterdam is Wieden+Kennedy’s oldest branch office, opened in 1992 — 10 years after the agency began. Nike, then expanding in Europe, invited Dan Wieden and David Kennedy to come along.

The advertising duo hadn’t planned to go international. But Kennedy and Wieden, whose “Just Do It” slogan had cinched Nike’s identity, took the plunge.

Nike gave W+K instant credibility in Europe. The agency’s Amsterdam office quickly attracted more clients.

“If we had struggled here when we opened,” Luhr says, “it would have been much more difficult for us to open other offices in China, India and Tokyo. It gave us a lot of confidence.”

Amsterdam’s roster includes consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble, California video game company Electronic Arts and Polish vodka company Wyborowa Wodka. The office has scored hits on TV and the Web.

Two years ago, the Amsterdam office launched the “Coke Happiness Factory” campaign, featuring an animated television commercial that captured industry awards.

In the ad, a man plugs a euro into a vending machine that becomes a magical Coca-Cola factory. A Coke bottle cools in a wintry landscape, drops through the ice, survives a hero’s parade and rolls out the vending-machine chute.

In January, for Electronic Arts, Amsterdam released a so-called viral video — an eye-popping clip designed for contagion on the Internet — showing street-soccer players accomplishing larger-than-life feats on Mexico City rooftops.

The video promoting Electronic Arts’ FIFA Street 3 game flashed across the world, attracting 500,000 hits in three days in France alone, while Internet surfers debated whether its acrobatics were real.

As an Electronic Arts senior communications manager put it, the “viral” did “a great job of blurring the line between reality and fiction.”

Visitors to Wieden+Kennedy’s Amsterdam office stroll along the Herengracht canal, a sedate waterway lined with wooden boats. At No. 258, worn concrete steps lead to the creaking wooden door of a traditional narrow canal house.

Inside — surprise! — a dazzling orange floor spreads into not one but two renovated canal houses. A Dutch artist’s ceiling murals depict gigantic hair follicles, a drop of blood, a heart with horns. Nooks feature couches, rugs and lamps — live/work spaces for staffers dwelling in a growing number of time zones.

Luhr’s reorganization, coinciding with the move, appears to be working. W+K Amsterdam managers say they’re on the verge of announcing two major clients, including one that would make it the second satellite office to pitch, win and manage a full global account.

London

Tony Davidson, Wieden+Kennedy’s executive creative director in London, vividly recalls Dan Wieden’s expression of horror.

The visiting agency president was regarding “The Wall” last year before the crucial pitch to Nokia, the world’s leading cell phone supplier, for a global account thought to be worth as much as $300 million.

The Wall, in W+K parlance, is actually a room with four walls that brainstormers plaster with ideas, photos and slogans that, ideally, produce something as compelling as “Just Do It.”

This time, Wieden knew The Wall had to outdo competitors at J. Walter Thompson, the buttoned-down New York advertising behemoth with 200 offices in 89 countries.

“He was going, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Davidson says. ” ‘We’re going into this huge pitch in a couple days, and you guys haven’t got anything.’ “

“I said, ‘I know, Dan,’ ” Davidson says.

And then Wieden spotted the hands — photos that would recharge the team.

The firm’s creatives say conventional ad companies, which they disdain as mere businesses, stick to a linear approach. In the W+K view, planners in such companies run surveys, crank numbers and produce polished reports listing business objectives, target markets and client budgets. They slip briefs under the creatives’ door, behind which advertising alchemy then unfolds.

Wieden+Kennedy, true to its organic Portland roots, prides itself on a more chaotic and democratic “swarm” approach. Planners, creatives and others collaborate to divine and convey what they call a brand’s “voice.” If The Wall goes “off-brief,” so be it.

Participants consider themselves above merely churning out commercials. Team members try to understand the people and philosophy behind a company, they say, translating them into messages that build a relationship between a brand and its customers.

“You can clever your way out of a problem,” says Kim Papworth, executive creative director with Davidson in London. “But you haven’t worked out the problem.”

The images that Wieden spotted on The Wall, plucked from photo-sharing Web site flickr.com and other sources, showed hands holding, shaking or touching in other ways. Team members say they felt the hands expressed the leave-no-one-behind values of Nokia’s Finnish managers.

“Then,” Davidson says, “we started putting words against them — sound bites from people talking about connections or their relationships.”

The hands ended up as a minor part of the pitch, but Wieden had brought The Wall to life, inspiring the team.

The London office — which struggled after opening in 1997, lost money, churned through managers and endured ridicule from the British media — proceeded to hit gold. The Nokia win made London the first W+K satellite office to clinch and run a global account of that size.

A year later, Davidson says London’s expanding team of 130 thrives on Nokia’s breakthroughs as the handset maker transforms its products into extensions of the Web.

“They’re no longer a mobile phone company; they’re an Internet company,” Davidson says. “This thing you have in your hand is your life; it’s your limb. Everything you do or say will connect through that. It’s just good to be around a company that’s in that change.”

And the Nokia contract — is it actually worth around $300 million?

“I have no idea,” Davidson says. “We didn’t go after the account because of the money.”

Portland

Walk past Wieden+Kennedy’s global headquarters in the postindustrial Pearl District, and see Dan Wieden — tall, white-bearded, smiling — chatting outside by the front door.

Five months after his wife died following a lengthy illness, the 63-year-old Wieden is back, fully involved.

In January, Wieden’s company won coveted status as Adweek’s Global Agency of the Year for its ability to expand internationally with its independent spirit intact. Now the agency, using high-profile hires to recover from a slow start in interactive advertising, is pushing digital frontiers.

Global capitalized billing keeps climbing, up 18 percent last year, to $1.65 billion, growing fastest abroad. Yet the agency maintains its understated hometown profile.

“Excuse me,” a befuddled woman down the street from W+K’s front door asks a passer-by. “Where’s Kennedy+Wieden?”

Luhr, Wieden+Kennedy’s world business chief, says the company has no choice but to be global. “It’s important for our clients, because everything is becoming global. It allows us to export the Wieden+Kennedy culture and import the ideas.”

Luhr expects to open two or three more foreign offices to round out the firm’s network. “We would love to have an office eventually in Central or South America somewhere.” Russia is another location that comes up.

But there are limits. Wieden+Kennedy began opening a Beijing office recently but pulled back, centralizing Chinese operations more economically in its Shanghai branch.

Luhr says the company will continue as a “micro network,” instead of morphing into one of the world’s multinational agencies. “They’re bloated,” he says. “We’re strategic.”

In his Global Agency of the Year story, Gregory Solman, Adweek’s West Coast editor in Los Angeles, quoted the late Jay Chiat, a legendary adman who built an agency empire: “How big can we get,” Chiat asked, “before we get bad?”

Wieden+Kennedy, Solman says, has “done a wonderful job at smartly expanding their network globally,” always entering a new market for a good business reason. One secret, he says, is the agency’s foreign-office recipe: mix one-third Wieden culture, one-third of the host city’s DNA and one-third of the office managers’ personalities — then shake.

John Boiler, a former top manager of W+K’s Amsterdam office, marvels at the agency’s ability to maintain its offbeat approach as it expands in a fast-changing industry. “So long as you accept the chaos and the evolution, you’ll fit in great there,” says Boiler, co-founder of Los Angeles agency 72andSunny.

Wieden+Kennedy is by no means immune from competition. Nike’s running division and its venture with Apple Inc. had a 13-month fling with another ad agency before making up with the Portland firm in May.

Solman contends Wieden can hold onto its home business while expanding. “What’s impressive about the network is they were purpose-built for Nike,” he says, “but they’re at the point where they could lose any of their clients and survive.”

Does the agency have an Achilles heel?

“Dan Wieden is probably one of the creative geniuses of the business of all time,” Solman says. “So they’re going to miss him when he retires.”

Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com