And the heat is continuing to rise in the Sunshine Coast’s best known locale, Noosa. “He wanted to create a place where kids felt safe and loved,” his wife said.Įver since the COVID lockdowns started, Queensland has become hot property, recording the highest levels of domestic migration in the country. Wieden and his family founded, which runs a summer camp at Blue Lake in central Oregon and other programs to nurture young people. She survives him, along with four children, six grandchildren, a brother and a sister. Wieden’s first wife, Bonnie Scott Wieden, died in 2008. A few years later, Wieden+Kennedy combined the versatile athlete Bo Jackson with Bo Diddley in an ad for Nike. The firm set itself apart by using a collage of New York street scenes, featuring Lou Reed and his song “Walk on the Wild Side,” to promote Honda scooters. Wieden’s writing talent.Īt first, their office was furnished with a card table and cardboard file cabinets. Kennedy, whose artistic skills and humor complemented Mr.

He tried freelance writing and then joined the ad firm of McCann-Erickson. He hated the job and, by his own admission, created so much trouble that he finally got fired. Wieden wrote marketing material for Georgia-Pacific Corp. His father, Francis “Duke” Wieden, was president of Gerber Advertising.Īfter graduating from the University of Oregon in 1967, the younger Mr. But they never had a heavy hand.”ĭan Gordon Wieden was born March 6, 1945, and grew up in Portland. In some ways, it was a sink-or-swim culture. Wieden and Kennedy “didn’t really dictate or mandate,” said Bill Davenport, a longtime colleague. Wary of complacency, he advised advertising people to “walk in stupid every morning.” As he put it: “The minute you think you know, the minute you go, ‘oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel,’ you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead.” People need to feel that you’re rooting for them to succeed.” As for managing people, he said, “I think people need to feel safe but still under pressure in some weird way, a healthy pressure. Wieden (pronounced why-den) attributed the firm’s success partly to a habit of hiring misfits and oddballs rather than seasoned advertising pros. Kennedy, died a year ago at the age of 82. Wieden created a trust to preserve the firm’s independence. To avoid the risk of being gobbled up by a giant holding company, Mr. The firm has about 1,500 employees and offices in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Since then a long list of clients has included Starbucks Corp., Microsoft Corp., McDonald’s Corp. Subaru of America hired Wieden+Kennedy in 1991. The Nike ads helped vault a tiny regional shop into a global advertising firm. Wieden came up with Nike’s tagline, “Just Do It.” The new agency’s founders were inclined to pitch ads that were offbeat, edgy and artistic. It was a perfect fit. Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder, loathed conventional advertising. They had one client: Nike Inc., then a small company.

In 1982, he joined David Kennedy to found the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, based in Portland, Ore. The challenge of packing a lot of meaning into a few words hooked him. That meant a need for steady income and led to advertising. He married young and had children in his 20s. In the mid-1960s, he majored in journalism at the University of Oregon. “I could never figure out why he was in such a whorish industry,” Mr. One thing Dan Wieden didn’t want to do as a young man was to follow his father into the advertising business.

Spiral knights auction house