Wieden + Kennedy London

The agency was founded by Dan Wieden and David Kennedy in Portland, Oregon. The London office was founded in 1998. Wieden and Kennedy met whilst working at Nike,  a company they continued to work with after they founded the agency in 1980. It is now one of the largest independent advertising agencies.  The company started in Portland and in the thirty years since they have expanded to own 8 offices world wide as well as maintaining their headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Wieden + Kennedy is somewhat unique in the advertising agency industry, they are still independently owned, and going against the nature of the industry have maintained the same founder throughout the thirty years.  Although the company was created upon advertising they now see themselves as they “encompass everything from building mobile apps to creating a life-size clay sculpture to celebrate a sporting win.”

Area of their London office

The agency describes its working process as “creatively led” and have “over 200 smart, lovely, hard-working people.” Across 8 office locations across the world.  the agency has offices in London, Amsterdam, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo and Delhi. Wienden Kennedy describe there some of their core philosophies are “the work comes first” and “don’t say it, be it”. The company operates with a creative priority.  The agency claims that their independence is crucial to their creativity and the way they work.  Eliza Williams, a writer for W+K claims that the best thing about independence is “it gives us the luxury of being honest with everyone, our clients and our people.” The agency have a number of creative teams, the number and the positions of people are varied throughout there different offices. Most include an art director who, working predominantly as a team with a Copywriter. The art directors role within the agency is to control the visual appearance of the advertising campaign, including type, image, colour, layouts and general design.  The company usually works with groups of 2-10 people on each projects, as well and integrating people from outside of the agency, for example for the Nike #makeitcount campaign they partnered with AKWQ. As part of their campaign the two agencies demonstrated how they integrate cross platform and new media, incorporating online social networking and short online videos as well as print adverts billboards and in-store advertising

Some of Wieden + Kennedy’s clients include Cravendale, Nike, Honda, Tesco, and Three Mobile. The companies portfolio of work seems to be very varied and with no specific focus of one type of company. All the campaigns also seem to be quite stylistically different to each other.  Some of the more successful campaigns they have down are for Honda, Cravendale and Nike.

Cravendale TV advert

Wieden +Kennedy is one of the largest advertising agencies and has competition from other agencies like JWT, Epsilon and Interpublic group but avoids  some amount of direct competition because of its independent status. Also they have merged with companies to work together for example AKWQ who do some similar sports based advertising. To work on the Nike campaign together. This helps to minimize competition and get the best produced advertising. One of the companies doing similar work on sports ad campaigns is WPP London.