The ascent began with a little soul-searching. W&K had
become a victim of its success, seeking perfection in every ad or
campaign. "Magic happens when there is a little bit of chaos, when
everybody's a little bit not sure," DeCourcy says. "We had begun to
qualify the ways in which things got done … be it from the
way it was made to … who got to do it or touch it. That
becomes an insular world. It took longer and longer to get into
production and we were making fewer things than we used to."
Adds DeCourcy: "Our people needed to be willing, and feel
permission, to not have every single thing they did be stellar, to
not have everything be epic and untouchably perfect."
A key moment came in 2016 when the agency expanded its
leadership team, moving from a nine-person partner model to a
24-person "stakeholder" group that expanded the power base beyond
Portland and London into its other offices.
W&K also overhauled its Portland leadership team for the
first time in nearly 10 years. Karrelle Dixon, former global
account director on W&K's Nike account, became managing
director. The agency reunited Eric Baldwin and Jason Bagley (who
returned from a stint at Deutsch) as new executive creative directors.
Baldwin and Bagley are pushing the "branded everything" approach
that inserts brands into pop culture in unexpected ways, using
everything from Reddit to comic books. The ethos energized an
agency that sometimes suffers from being pigeonholed as a maker of
TV ads.
For Old Spice and KFC, W&K pumps out roughly 300 pieces of
content a year each. "It's constant experimentation," Bagley
says.
The shop's work for KFC has helped fuel 13 consecutive quarters
of U.S. same-store sales growth, the agency says. (The streak ended
in the fourth quarter when sales dipped 1 percent.) It did so by
creating a brand world around the Colonel character, who has been
played by a rotating cast of actors, most recently the first female
Colonel, Reba McEntire. The Colonel pops up everywhere, from a
comic book made by DC Comics to romance novels and, most
recently, meditation films pushing KFC's potpies.
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KFC is blessed with historical assets like the
red-and-white-striped motif. "What Wieden has done is take those
assets and say we can basically apply them to everything and become
a part of culture everywhere," says Kevin Hochman, KFC's president
and chief concept officer. Recently, W&K held an all-agency
brief on the KFC business, allowing everyone to weigh in. "When
people start feeling confident that ideas can come from anywhere
and they can be anything, then people have a tendency to share
more," says Susan Hoffman, W&K's global co-chief creative
officer.
The shop's creative technology unit, called W&K Lodge, was
behind "Nike Live Design," a high-tech retail installation allowing
people to custom-design sneakers in less than 90 minutes. Its
editorial and entertainment arm produced an interactive music video
for rock band Portugal. The Man's "Feel It Still" track. It
contained hidden Easter eggs that revealed social resistance tools:
Clicking on an image of a woman dancing with her face and mouth
covered generated a "Save the EPA" message and information on how
people can get involved. It earned more than 70 million views, says
W&K.
The agency's 100-person design studio rebranded Chiquita as part
of a campaign that visually linked bananas to last summer's solar
eclipse. The result: "Banana Sun." The agency also regained
traction on Coke, which had been giving more work to Fitzco/McCann, by winning assignments for the
Super Bowl, the Olympics and beyond.
