Ad Agency Joins Big Leagues Offbeat Ads Give Wieden & Kennedy Visibility

The wall in the enormous atrium at the center of the Wieden & Kennedy advertising agency is full of framed black-and-white photographs of the staff. The man in drag is co-founder Dan Wieden.

Everybody else is posing like somebody else, or something else, from another planet - someplace where sheer goofiness is a way of life.

“Those photos on the wall are from our 13th anniversary party,” Wieden said. “That shocking rebelliousness is very much a part of the culture here. I think that helps bind us together.”

It also is a source of the creativity that helped Wieden & Kennedy bill $450 million in 1994, pushing it from No. 82 nationally to one of the top 25 U.S. agencies listed by Advertising Age, the industry bible.

The growth has paralleled that of the firm’s largest and oldest client, Nike Inc., the international athletic shoe and clothing maker based in suburban Beaverton.

“We have a lot in common,” said Keith Peters, Nike’s chief spokesman. “We both have a nontraditional approach to things. When we have meetings, it’s hard to tell who works for whom. Our people look like their people.”

It is an approach that also has attracted clients such as Microsoft and Coca-Cola, who have hired Wieden & Kennedy to help mold their image the way the firm has created a corporate personality for Nike.

“Companies are looking for agencies with more creative talent,” said Dave Stewart, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California.

“A lot of the new organizations, the Nikes and the Microsofts of the world, are less hierarchical, with more open structures, and they look for agencies with similar structures or cultures.”

Stewart says the decline of the commercial television networks has fragmented the market and reduced the influence of traditional agencies clustered in New York and Chicago.

Instead of relying on one agency, many advertising clients are “shopping” a number of agencies in search of new approaches to consumers.

“They want to increase the level of creativity,” Stewart said. “If you use one agency, you get a certain philosophy of creativity. By using multiple agencies you cast a broader net looking for the ‘big idea.’ It’s the idea behind the rise of the regional agencies or the boutiques.”

The freedom to roam can also quickly cost an agency an account, as Wieden & Kennedy found out in 1993 when it lost Subaru America, the U.S. outlet for the Japanese automaker that specializes in allwheel drive cars, after only two years.

But industry observers say regional ad agencies probably will benefit in a market being shaped by a consumer move away from network TV and into the computers that link the information superhighway.

“It’s not clear to me that the conventional ad agency will be able to make it into the 21st century,” said Roland Rust, a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

He says big agencies have changed as television has gone through three separate stages of competition: overthe-air broadcast competition among three TV networks in the 1950s and ‘60s; fragmentation into cable channels in the 1970s; and the expansion of computer networks, especially the Internet.

“That’s really going to knock them for a loop,” Rust said. “It’s a move toward decentralization in every aspect.”

The changes are boosting business for firms such as the Advertising Agency Register, which pairs clients with agencies.

Leslie Winthrop, president of the firm’s North American office in New York, says the industry is going through its biggest changes since the late 1970s, when dependence on single agencies began to break down.

“We’d been sitting there 10 years and all of a sudden our time has come,” Winthrop said. “We haven’t changed what we’ve offered since 1980, and our numbers have gone through the roof, starting in ‘91.”

Companies are smaller and leaner, she said, and the media options have exploded with the rise of computer networks. Just finding the right agency takes an investment in time and effort.

As a result, high visibility for one regional agency, such as Wieden & Kennedy, tends to attract companies to other agencies in the area.

“It actually helps us,” said Debby Kennedy, managing director of Cole & Weber, established in Portland in 1932 and ranked fifth-largest in the city by The Business Journal.

The agency, which beat Wieden & Kennedy in an industry award show last year in New York, recently landed an account with Silicon Graphics Inc., the California supercomputer maker whose machines helped create the special effects for “Jurassic Park.”

“It helps out-of-town clients help see beyond the fact that we’re out in Portland,” Kennedy said. “The more agencies there are in Portland or other secondary markets like Minneapolis, the better it is for the industry.”