It’s the end of an era at Wieden+Kennedy. Colleen DeCourcy, the celebrated agency’s global chief creative officer and president, is retiring from advertising at the age of 56, and with that, she also signs off from the celebrated independent shop after a nearly decade-long run.

Over the course of her tenure, Wieden+Kennedy continued to break ground creatively and proved as strong as ever since Dan Wieden and the late David Kennedy founded the agency in 1982 in Portland, Oregon. With eight offices around the world, under her watch, it consistently produced iconic work for founding client Nike and brought fame to newcomers including McDonald’s, KFC, Anheuser-Bush, Ford and more.

Read: An extended Q&A with Colleen DeCourcy on where Wieden+Kennedy will go next.

That included cultural masterstrokes such as Nike’s controversial Colin Kaepernick “Dream Crazy” campaign and elegantly crafted “You Can’t Stop Us” pandemic ad. The agency also ruled fast food with inventive work reinventing Colonel Sanders for former client KFC and for its fresh take on celebrity partnerships with McDonald’s. Other major account wins included Airbnb, Facebook and Visa.

And with all those successes came numerous accolades, including Ad Age’s Agency of the Year honor for an unprecedented three years in a row, from 2018 through 2020.

DeCourcy joined the agency in 2013 in the role of global executive creative director. The hire signaled that Wieden+Kennedy was moving into a new era of leadership, with co-founder Wieden stepping into a chairman role. DeCourcy’s responsibilities grew over time and in 2016 she became the first at the agency to hold the title of global CCO, adding president to her duties in 2018. In that time, the agency’s leadership structure also changed, moving from a partner model to a “stakeholder” group designed to diversify and further incentivize its talents. 

See Ad Age’s 2021 Year in Review here.

By the time DeCourcy signed on at the agency, she had already cut her teeth running her own company Socialistic, a social media content and design shop, where she had served as both chief creative and CEO. Before that she held key leadership posts at TBWA Worldwide, as its first chief digital officer; as chief experience officer at JWT New York and as chief creative officer at Toronto digital agency Organic, which was acquired by Omnicom in 2003. All that experience set her up to bring fresh thinking to her new gig. 

“When I came to Portland, there was a very clear remit,” she said. “In my mind, I had a very specific job to do, and it was basically, to take us from ‘Buddha’ to ‘Buddhism.’ Dan was, as you know, not going to be running the company, and that was a very scary thing to a lot of people. Also, the market was changing, advertising was changing, and they really wanted to be sure that Wieden+Kennedy always had the opportunity to be Wieden+Kennedy through all those changes, that we wouldn’t get caught in our old rhetoric, that we would always dynamically be learning new things. In my head, I was coming in to be that link between the past and the future.”

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“Colleen came in with the resolve and enthusiasm of a change agent,” said Wieden+Kennedy Chairman Tom Blessington in a statement. “She provoked, prodded and led this agency, and the industry for that matter, in immeasurable and lasting ways over the last nine years. For that and more, we are forever grateful and wish her all the best in retirement.”

DeCourcy said to step back now is to continue the work she set out to do in the first place. “You can’t be a huge advocate for change and not ever think it means you,” she said. “If you really believe that injecting new thinking, new blood and new dynamics into a company like Wieden only makes it more interesting, then at a certain point, you change yourself out too.”

See all of Ad Age's 2021 Marketers of the Year here.

Wieden+Kennedy will not be filling DeCourcy’s role—the agency, she said, is already on course under the steady leadership of Karl Lieberman and Neal Arthur, the former New York leaders who in late 2020 were respectively elevated to the roles of global chief creative officer and global chief operating officer.

Both leaders said they’re grateful for what DeCourcy has done for the team and for them personally, with Lieberman noting that “she’s led the way in showing that it’s not about micromanaging this place or giving it some sort of narrow idea about what it should be, it's about giving people the space, the support and the perspective they need to do the job in their own way.” 

“Colleen is an absolute legend,” Arthur added. “It’s exciting to know that she will be out in the world, imposing her will and making impact on spaces beyond advertising.”

DeCourcy’s departure is the latest major change at the agency. Wieden+Kennedy recently parted ways with one of its most famous clients under her watch, KFC. While Lieberman and Arthur will continue to steer the ship from New York, the Portland office recently got an injection of fresh talent with the arrival of New York’s former head of social, John “JP” Petty, who stepped up to executive creative director alongside fellow Executive Creative Directors Hermeti and Ana Balarin, the celebrated leaders who recently joined from Mother London.

As for her next move, DeCourcy said that rejoining the agency world isn’t an option. “If I was ever going to continue working in this industry, it would be at Wieden+Kennedy,” she said. “I wouldn’t leave.”

If anything, she’s hoping to explore the rest of the world out there. “I’m interested in what’s happening with social media, R&D,” she said. “There’s are just so many things, so I’ll kind of hang out and enjoy a little space. There are some things I’m thinking about already, but they won’t be my major, big-ass career. I’m done and I’m excited. I think I’ve earned that.”

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