Wieden+Kennedy mined truths and pushed buttons in a year of creative triumphs

When Nike debuted its 2024 Olympic campaign from Wieden+Kennedy last summer, themed “Winning Isn’t for Everyone,” not everybody was impressed. “Colossal misstep,” said Forbes. “Very, very worrying,” said The Drum. “Toxic,” said The Boston Globe. The anthem spot featured Willem Dafoe, speaking for athletes everywhere, musing about whether it’s a bad thing to want to crush the competition in a culture where everyone’s supposed to get a trophy. “Am I a bad person?” he asks... Tell me. Am I? I’m single-minded. I’m deceptive. I’m obsessive. I’m selfish. Does that make me a bad person? Am I a bad person? Am I? I have no empathy. I don’t respect you. I’m never satisfied. I have an obsession with power. I’m irrational. I have zero remorse. I have no sense of compassion. I’m delusional. I’m maniacal. You think I’m a bad person? Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Am I? I think I’m better than everyone else. I want to take what’s yours and never give it back. What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine. Am I a bad person? Tell me. Am I? Does that make me a bad person? The ad, starring pro and Olympic athletes, immediately struck a nerve. There was much hand-wringing in the media that the message—putting winning over sportsmanship—set a bad example for kids, and perhaps society, at the kumbaya moment of the Olympics. Nike countered that it was just the truth. Elite athletes do want to destroy their rivals. Why not come out and say it? “This is about celebrating the voice of the athlete,” Nicole Graham, chief marketing officer at Nike, said at the time. “It’s a story about what it takes to be the best. ... It reminds the world that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to win.” The work followed a March earnings call in which then-CEO John Donahoe said Nike’s brand marketing needed to be “bolder and more distinctive.” In other words, Nike had to start being Nike again. Wieden+Kennedy would lead that charge creatively in 2024, helping its longtime client reclaim its swagger with strong craft, a degree of fearlessness and a clear point of view—as evidenced by the Olympic work, a dagger of a campaign during the year’s top sporting moment. The agency, meanwhile, would rediscover its own swagger in 2024. W+K crafted compelling work with a modern edge across a slew of brands, enjoying arguably its best creative year since 2018, when its acclaimed Colin Kaepernick work for Nike helped kick off a three-year run at No. 1 on Ad Age’s A-List. For creative triumphs that earned buzz and business results—for Nike, McDonald’s, DoorDash, Eli Lilly and more—Wieden+Kennedy is Ad Age’s 2025 Creative Agency of the Year. Battling through adversity 2024 was hardly pain-free for W+K. In February, the Portland, Oregon, office laid off 20% of staff—some 90 employees—to “remain healthy as a company.” Also, revenue for the network was flat in 2024. (It has hovered around $300 million annually for the past several years.) Creatively, though, the agency has rarely looked stronger, particularly on longtime marquee client Nike. See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here The sports marketer has endured its own business challenges of late—a slump under a direct-to-consumer sales model, an overreliance on performance marketing, a lack of innovation, a diminishing cool factor. As new CEO Elliott Hill tackles the production and distribution issues, Nike is also recommitting to bold brand advertising, which is what built the $50 billion company in the first place. Nike spent more money on its Olympic advertising in 2024 than at any prior Games, and Graham has been single-minded in shifting the focus of all the work back to athletes—in close partnership with W+K. “It’s a really exciting time to be working with Nike, just feeling the energy come back,” said Kathryn Addo, W+K’s global managing director for Nike. “Olympics felt like a true return. Winning, or at least wanting to win, was being debated in society—whether or not it’s a good thing. For athletes, it’s paramount. Tapping back into those truths, that’s when you feel like you’re making the best, truest, most exciting Nike work.” Nike followed the Olympic anthem spot with a slew of individual athlete videos and a barrage of out-of-home ads dripping with attitude, posted in cities worldwide. For Graham, “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” was exactly the kind of brash, truth-driven broadside that the brand—and the advertising world—needed. “The industry of marketing has lost some of its dreaming, some of its wowing, some of its emotion and instead teetered into a transactional, rational industry,” she told Ad Age. “Our brand has always thrived on disruptive, irreverent ideas and emotional stories all inspired by sport and athletes.” With W+K’s help, “we found our way back to ourselves,” Graham said. “They reminded us how powerful sport is to inspire and unite people. This partnership and team have always been, and will continue to be, critical to our future success.” Beyond the Olympics While the Olympics were a highlight, Nike and W+K were firing on all cylinders throughout 2024. In the fall, the “Winning” campaign evolved to focus on runners, under the line “Winning Isn’t Comfortable.” Spots in September paid tribute to runners’ pain and self-sacrifice—a long-running theme of Nike running ads going back to the ‘70s. In November, out-of-home executions popped up along the New York City Marathon race route, featuring knowing one-liners the runners would appreciate. “Once we started to unlock that voice, it felt really special—and really democratic,” said Blair Warren, global executive creative director on the brand at W+K. “How do we show up in a way that feels very specific while also making sure the message is felt by all different types of runners—not only the elites, and not only the everyday runners?” W+K also made eye-catching campaigns for two young Nike basketball superstars, Caitlin Clark and Victor Wembanyama. In February, Nike celebrated Clark as she set the women’s NCAA scoring record with ads that read, “You break it, you own it.” A month later, as she led Iowa to its second straight national title game, ads declared, “This was never a long shot.” An irresistible two-part out-of-home execution in Iowa City showed Clark shooting from one building-side billboard toward a rim across the street. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike (@nike) After she broke the record, Nike added a hoop to the other side of the street for their Iowa City billboard for Caitlin Clark 🏀 pic.twitter.com/U50TwiCuLQ— Front Office Sports (@FOS) March 4, 2024 The Clark work shows W+K’s knack for helping Nike not just join the sports conversation at key moments but add value to it—with work that stands out, strikes a chord and itself becomes part of the story. “There is an expectation of, ‘What will Nike say? What is their take going to be?‘” said Addo. “Then, when you drop something, there is genuine excitement to see Nike show up in those spaces.” The Wembanyama work had its own unique flavor, leaning on media and design. Last spring, Nike developed an alien-looking logo for the French NBA superstar—then launched it during the April 8 solar eclipse in the form of a giant crop circle in south Texas. (Crop circles are associated with aliens, and San Antonio, where Wembanyama plays, happened to be in the path of totality for the eclipse.) View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike (@nike) “We are nothing without our media partners,” said Warren. “They’ll come to us and say, ‘Hey, we have this dormant billboard’ or ‘There’s a solar eclipse happening over San Antonio—let’s do something.’ Sometimes they beat us to the punch in the best way. They bring solutions no one’s really expecting.” Looking at Nike’s creative year as a whole, it is about being additive in culture—but it’s also just about the fundamentals of good advertising: nailing the brand voice with dead-simple copy and images. “It’s strange, given all the technology we have—a lot of it is just getting back to the discipline of a great print ad,” said Karl Lieberman, W+K’s global chief creative officer. “How do you create that incredible print-ad moment that the whole world can see really quickly and digest and hopefully love?” “We’re continually surprised and excited about all the new rocks that keep getting turned over,” said Caleb Jensen, W+K’s other global ECD on Nike. “They’re as excited to make great stuff as we are.” Covering more ‘surface area’ As W+K has modernized its creative approach, it’s largely focused on evolving beyond being merely an “ad maker” to touch more aspects of a client’s businesses, and to expand what it refers to as a brand’s “surface area”—all the ways it shows up in the world. “‘Brand’ used to be a veneer that was built on advertising,” said Neal Arthur, the agency’s global CEO. “Now, we get to work on all of it—how products show up, how innovation happens. It’s unlocked a lot more places for our creativity.” Nowhere is this more evident than on McDonald’s. W+K’s most interesting McDonald’s work in 2024 went well beyond traditional ads. It explored anime through the “WcDonald’s” campaign, brought nostalgia to merch through Collector’s Cups and teamed up with Kai Cenat in a novel influencer play. The Cenat campaign is a microcosm of W+K’s approach. Rather than bring the Twitch streamer into their world, W+K and McDonald’s went to his. A McDonald’s fan already, Cenat agreed to sample the Chicken Big Mac on a livestream. In return, McDonald’s helped him secure guests such as Miranda Cosgrove, John Cena and Serena Williams. When we partnered with Kai Cenat, McDonald's part of the deal was to make some of his wildest dreams happen in terms of guests for his streams.Some may say it's not our role, but believe me : spend one meeting with Kai and you'll realize this man has a skill that you see very… pic.twitter.com/6rBLhssxmz— Guillaume Huin (@HuinGuillaume) November 11, 2024 Cenat ended up doing three and a half hours of McDonald’s content over multiple livestreams in October and November. “The bad version of that is, cut to Kai Cenat in a McDonald’s ad,” said Arthur. “We talk about, what’s the thing that’s true and how do we get closest to it? He was already a huge Big Mac fan. He’s already doing these videos—we’re not going to make anything better than that. Let’s just go hang with that dude for a minute.” W+K is trying to do this everywhere: get brands into new places, and embrace fandoms without dictating the conversation there. WcDonald’s was the same way—W+K embraced an existing McDonald’s fandom in anime. The Grimace campaigns, too, live largely in the world of fans. Instead of being in another ad, Grimace threw out the first pitch at a Mets game—and soon became the team’s good luck charm. “We used to look at the brand’s own surface area—the cocktail napkins on the Delta plane,” Lieberman said. “A lot of brands have that covered now. So we’re leaving the house more. And when we leave the house, we never want to just walk around the neighborhood with a mirror.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by McDonald’s (@mcdonalds) “W+K has helped McDonald’s use creativity to transform how we show up for our fans while driving the business time and time again,” said Jennifer “JJ” Healan, VP of marketing, brand, content and culture at McDonald’s U.S. “This has helped put the brand at the heart of culture and made our marketing an engine of growth for the brand and the business.” DoorDash wins the Super Bowl Another shiny feather in W+K’s cap in 2024 was the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, which W+K won for its “DoorDash All the Ads” Super Bowl campaign. The DoorDash story is also one of fandom—but one built on utility. People love what it does for them. So, W+K highlights that functionality. To show that DoorDash can deliver anything, the brand came up with an audacious Super Bowl stunt that was basically a giant product demo: It promised to deliver products and services from every other advertiser on the game to one lucky winner. In the end, it struck 76 partnerships and got 8 million contest submissions. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Wieden+Kennedy (@wiedenkennedy) “DoorDash’s marketing approach is built on creating real-world value for people, and the best work happens when you have partners who not only share that vision but are also wired to embrace bold ideas to bring it to life. That’s Wieden+Kennedy,” said Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, chief marketing officer at DoorDash. Constant reinvention W+K produced other interesting work in 2024 for brands such as Eli Lilly, Netflix, the Museum of Modern Art and more. And it’s off to a busy start in 2025, too. The Nike work continues to shine. Its range under W+K was evident in its first Super Bowl spot in 27 years, saluting women athletes, followed by an Eagles congrats ad on Instagram after the game, set to Kermit the Frog’s “Bein’ Green.” (Lieberman, an Eagles fan, helped craft the latter spot himself.) Very different spots in very different places—both undeniably Nike. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike (@nike) A third effort, at the Eagles’ victory parade, added another dimension. For Nike’s Jordan Brand, W+K designed a companion piece to Claes Oldenburg’s Love sculpture, so the famous Philly landmark read “Love Hurts”—a tribute to Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts. @phillypublicist Love HURTS 💚 Iconic Love Statue gets a Jalen Hurts makeover #philly #philadelphia #eagles #gobirds #jalenhurts #lovepark #Super ♬ Blow the Whistle - Too $hort For Nike, it was yet more surface area. For W+K, it was another step on a journey of constant creative reinvention. “This place is always looking to stay true to what it does and why it was founded in the first place, but at the same time it’s constantly finding ways to reinvent how it does those things,” Lieberman said. “That reinvention’s never easy. It’s usually pretty messy, and it comes with some real ups and downs over the years. But at the end of the day, I think that’s what makes Wieden+Kennedy still so special some 40-plus years after Dan and David created it.” See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here

Wieden+Kennedy mined truths and pushed buttons in a year of creative triumphs

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