Creativity Innovators of the Year 2015: Wieden & Kennedy, Portland

Where do you go after larger-than-life characters like The Man Your Man Can Smell LIke and Terry Crews? Wieden & Kennedy Portland proved it could bring even more freshness to Old Spice with an unlikely new spokesperson -- mom. The agency seemed to come out of nowhere with the ridiculously funny "Momsong," featuring son-stalking mothers singing an '80s-style ballad -- an innovative way to target an unexpected market for the brand's body spray. It followed with another equally comedic spot in which dads chime in. Moms also played a big role, once again, in the agency's Olympics work for P&G. A worthy follow-up to the Emmy-winning "Best Job in the World," the new ad was another emotional heavy-hitter and showed mothers picking their kids up whenever they would fall -- an important role especially when your kid's on the way to becoming an Olympian. For the World Cup, the agency followed its award-winning "Write the Future" campaign for Nike with the bold "Risk Everything" integrated push, which included a heart-pulsing anthem directed by Jonathan Glazer and another high-octane ad in which a boys' pickup game becomes a big league showdown when the kids imagine themselves as football stars. The agency followed with another big production spot, "The Last Game," an ambitious animated tale about a world of the future in which risk-taking players are replaced by more dependable clones. The risk-takers, or "originals," however ultimately secure the fate of football by vanquishing their predictable competitors in a final, big match. The agency created one of the ads that generated plenty of talk during the Super Bowl, for Coca-Cola. It featured the many, multi-cultural faces of the U.S., coupled with a track of kids singing "America is Beautiful" in seven different languages, including Tagalog, Hindi and Senegalese The ad's 90-second version went on to run at the Sochi Olympics. W&K Portland proved it was up to snuff for an unexpected category, weight loss, with a surprisingly poignant yet funny new campaign for Weight Watchers, which launched with a whimsical ad that twisted the classic children's tune "If You're Happy and You Know It" into a more depressing observation about struggling with food. On the digital side, W&K Portland went on to devise a super smart way to promote Sony Xperia phones and its waterproof-feature: it created a series of mobile games that could be played only when the phones were submerged in water. See the other Creativity 2015 Innovators of the Year.

Creativity Innovators of the Year 2015: Wieden & Kennedy, Portland

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