When eulogizing a man with the gravitas Dan Wieden built across sports and marketing, the enormity of his influence renders certain some degree of failure. This is the man who coined Nike’s “Just Do It,” after all.
Wieden developed several iconic campaigns for Nike.getty images
Wieden, who died at 77 last month, and iconoclastic Wieden+Kennedy’s seminal work with Nike helped transform an apparel nameplate into sports’ most indelible brand, and arguably the top brand worldwide. It was done so uniquely and with such confidence, originality and panache that Wieden and Nike’s impact across sports and culture was not unlike the Beatles: enormous, transformative and continually influential. In an age when attention spans are shorter than a TikTok video, we’re still marveling decades later over creative like Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon ads, Charles Barkley’s “I am not a role model” admonition and “Bo Knows.”
Consider the melding of sports and pop culture; a force responsible for growing American sports the way cable TV did for the generation before Michael Jordan. Wieden helped stoke and ignite that fire, with fellow University of Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight as a kindred cultural pyromaniac.
“Dan Wieden is responsible for many of the campaigns that helped Nike cross over from sports to pop culture in a way that had never been done,” said Scott Rosner, a professor and academic director at Columbia University’s Sports Management Program.
Wieden and Knight drew or commissioned marketing blueprints still being copied by an unending variety of product, service and property marketers. Brand uber alles? Treating a property or athlete as a brand?
Before Nike, branding was largely for packaged goods giants, like Procter & Gamble, Unilever or Coke. Now that the swoosh is as connected to its consumers as any brand on the planet and a $47 billion company, the athletic footwear business is a touchstone for marketers, and the branding imperative is a universally accepted need for marketers of every stripe, er, swoosh.
“Dan Wieden and Nike created a whole new language around sports marketing that was a completely different view — merging entertainment, sport and culture,” said Chris Zimmerman, St. Louis Blues president and CEO of business operations, who spent 11 years at Nike from 1995-2006, including three as North America advertising director. “They had courage, a willingness to take risks and to push people to places where they weren’t comfortable. Without question, that was a trademark of Wieden and Nike, who was always willing to go there with them.”
Joani Wardwell worked with both Knight, while she was at Nike from 1999-2006, and with Wieden at the agency from 2006-2016 in a variety of corporate communications jobs. “They both hated anything that was inauthentic, and they both loved storytelling and were good at it in their quiet ways,” she said.
To those who needed it conclusively demonstrated, W+K showed that great creative wasn’t limited to the confines of Madison Avenue. So, the man who many times said he wasn’t building an ad agency often did so by hiring those from outside the field.
“Dan led from his heart, not his head,” said Lee Ann Daly, who had W+K as an agency while she was executive vice president/marketing at ESPN. “He’d want to find the person in or outside the agency who cared the most about something like pro bowling and put them on the account, because their love will show through. That was Dan.”
For a longer version of this story with more on Dan Wieden’s career, see Terry Lefton’s SBJ Marketing newsletter.
