Susan Hoffman looks back—inside the career of employee No. 8 at Wieden+Kennedy

In 1983, just as Dan Wieden and David Kennedy invited her to join the agency they’d launched the year before, Susan Hoffman got another offer—one that most people told her was surely a better one. “I got a call from Borders Perrin Norrander, which was the local agency here [in Portland, Oregon] that was doing well,” Hoffman recalled recently. “Wieden was nothing at the time. Nike was nothing. If you compared the agencies, one was a proper one—and Wieden was more of a startup. Everyone said, ‘Oh, you have to go to Borders.’ And I couldn’t. I said, ‘I have to go back and work with Dan and David.’” Everything else, as they say, is history. Four decades later, Hoffman is still at Wieden+Kennedy—and in many ways is now the heart and soul of the agency, following Kennedy’s death in 2021 and Wieden’s in 2022. Cannes Lions coverage Follow our live blog here Sign up here for email updates See all of the Grand Prix winners here Hoffman has enjoyed a sparkling creative career. Her work on Nike alone, building the sports marketer into one of the world’s top brands, is Hall of Fame worthy—with landmark spots including the fabled “Revolution” spot in 1987, “If You Let Me Play” in 1995 and “Da Da Ding” in 2016. And then there’s everything else she’s done at the world’s leading independent agency: lending her unique perspective to virtually every client it’s ever had; opening its Amsterdam and London offices; running W+K 12, its experimental ad school; mentoring emerging talent with humor and heart; and helping to define and sustain the ineffable W+K culture, which, as much as anything, has been key to its success. “Susan Hoffman never said no to the impossible,” Dan Wieden said in posthumous remarks provided by the agency. “This woman, with her crazy-ass laugh and devotion to creative excellence, brings unexpected magic to this agency. Time after time after time.” Hoffman continues to bring the magic in a career that’s far from over. But this week, she’ll have to pause briefly from what she loves best—nurturing the work and preaching the W+K gospel—to accept the Lion of St. Mark award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, one of the industry’s top prizes for lifetime achievement. In a lengthy interview recently, Hoffman was typically self-effacing about the award—and about her place in the W+K story generally—repeatedly crediting the founders for building the agency in their own idiosyncratic image, which has endured. “I know they’re not here anymore, but I’m still here for them,” she said. “There was always a truth and an honesty that I got from both of them. It wasn’t always easy. I mean, they yelled at us and got mad at us. But it’s a great place to work because of that culture and that belief system and that anti-corporate [philosophy].” To her colleagues, though, Hoffman was—and is—an integral part of the story. This was clear last summer when the agency asked employees worldwide for their best Susan anecdotes to celebrate her tenure at the agency, and the endless heartfelt and hilarious tributes and recollections poured in. “Susan is my hero. My best friend. My mentor. My favorite person in the world,” wrote one. Added another: “We talk a ton about Dan and David and the legacy they built here at W+K. But the truth is, so much of that was built alongside the one and only Susan Hoffman. She plowed down barriers and ceilings and walls and all the things so that we could all thrive creatively as our genuine selves.” Indeed, it’s been quite the ride. And if Hoffman bristles ever so slightly at the memorializing quality of a lifetime achievement award, she’ll take it—with an eye always on the future. The Nike revolution Creatively, Hoffman will forever be linked to Nike, and for good reason. Her work on the brand has been nothing short of revolutionary—beginning, aptly enough, with the “Revolution” spot that became a pop-culture sensation in 1987. “Dan said I would be working with Janet Champ, who at the time was a receptionist,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Why would I work with a receptionist?’ Dan said, ‘If you don’t think you can work with a receptionist, this is not the right place for you.’ He could recognize people’s voices, whether it be in their writing or their personality. It was really a gift to be able to figure out how to put different people together.” Hoffman, Champ and Kristi M. Roberts soon went to lunch at a Portland restaurant called The Dakota. “That clearly must have had some influence on how we came up with it,” she said. They came back with an idea for a black-and-white sports montage, set to the Beatles’ 1968 track “Revolution.” It would become one of the most famous ads ever made. “Dan and David got really upset and he said, ‘How do you think we’re going to get a Beatles song?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, sorry, we messed up,’” Hoffman recalled about pitching the idea. “Then, weirdly, in the afternoon, they called us back in. We thought we were in trouble, but they said, ‘We’ve been thinking about it, and your idea is the one that gets us the most excited.’” They got Paula Greif and Peter Kagan to direct. The result was unlike anything people had ever seen. Indeed, it tested poorly with the public, who didn’t know what to make of it. That simply convinced Nike founder Phil Knight to just stop testing ads, which Nike doesn’t do to this day. “That was back in the day when people didn’t use songs like they do now,” Hoffman said. “I remember there were quite a few writeups saying, ‘That’s not an ad’—people not liking it. And I don’t mean the general public. I mean, advertising people.” The spot would also get Nike sued by the Beatles, which became its own lengthy saga. “That was really scary,” said Hoffman. “We were all like, ‘Oh, well, this is the end of Wieden.’ We were OK in the end, but we were really glad we weren’t the lawyers on it.” Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here Hoffman said the Nike-W+K partnership has always been a remarkable merging of like-minded souls. “We’re pretty spoiled, to be honest. Phil has said this—without Wieden, there would be no Nike. And we’ve always said without Nike, there wouldn’t have been a Wieden. It was one of those ‘planets aligning perfectly,’” she said. “I remember one time we presented three ideas to them, and one of the clients said, ‘I like all three, but the last one scares me and I don’t totally understand it, so let’s go with that one.’ Even if they’re not as controversial [as they used to be], they still have so much truth in that brand and so much passion for athletes.” She added: “So much is by gut. If something bores you, it’s probably going to bore me. If something excites you, it’s probably going to excite me. It’s amazing how much Phil and company seeded things like ‘Don’t research ads.’ ‘Be authentic to sport.’ ‘Put our athletes on a pedestal but be truthful.’ All of that stuff gets passed down. Thank you, Phil, is all I can say.” Hoffman was later creative director on “If You Let Me Play,” written by Janet Champ in the mid-’90s, one of the first great Nike spots championing women. And more recently, there was “Da Da Ding,” the celebrated Nike India spot from 2016. “[‘Da Da Ding’ is] another good example of Nike’s belief system, which is being authentic to the region,” she said. “That spot would not have been that spot without the creatives [art director Anyaa Dev and copywriter Ankita Tobit]—they were both Indian and they were both women. I remember the first script we saw. It was going to be a song. We just really liked the writing. We had the right people on it to figure out how to get there.” The power of debate Whether she won or lost any battle along the way, to Hoffman, having that battle at all was half of the point—arguing and debating always led to better work. “We used to argue a lot in the early days. I remember one time I was yelling at Dan so loud that he said, ‘Can you shut the door?’ I go, ‘No, I’m pissed off!’ So he goes and shuts it. We were volatile sometimes, and it wasn’t a personal thing—it was always about the work. I would love to get back to that because I think we need fire.” Hoffman believes COVID has had a devastating effect on creativity, as it separated people and made that kind of in-person give and take impossible. “I’m going to blame at least 75% of our problems on COVID,” she said. “It’s hurt us so much—whether it be the work, our relationships. I think we’ve lost a lot. I’m not sure how we get back to that kind of thing again.” She believes the industry’s evolution to more project work, and fewer AOR relationships, has also created distance—at a time when clients, navigating an increasingly crowded and complex world, can least afford it. “It’s harder for brands now. There’s so much competition,” she said. “There’s so many sports brands. There’s so many food brands. It gets difficult for people on these brands [to] figure out, where’s that sweet spot? How do we step out of where everybody is in the swimming pool and do something relevant for the brand? It takes a lot of exploring now. “The one-off assignments—I’m not sure you can dig deep enough into a brand. If you have an ongoing relationship, you can get to that. If a client doesn’t feel comfortable with something, you can dig into that. I think clients that push the work make the work better. I love that. But these days, the relationship is almost as important as the work—without it, you don’t get to the work.” Innovating to survive If it sounds like Hoffman is merely pining for the good old days, well, not entirely. W+K has always grown by evolving and reinventing itself and it’s something Hoffman believes is critical, too, even as preaches the more universal truths of the business. Emerging platforms, for instance—W+K made its name in TV and print but tried to embrace digital from the beginning, which laid the groundwork for its innovations in digital today. “We used to be worried about four things—TV, out-of-home, radio and print. It’s pretty mind-boggling to see where we’ve come,” said Hoffman. “I remember when Dan put his foot down [at one point in the early 2000s] and said, ‘We’re going to be the digital agency of the year.’ We’re all like, ‘What does that mean?’ But it was even funnier than that—Dan didn’t know what it meant. He’d just been reading about all this stuff. And it was good that he did that. We didn’t learn it overnight, but that was the beginning of the things we have going on now.” Today, W+K has a whole unit called Bodega staffed by internet junkies dedicated to living in new media and helping brands engage in those spaces. “It took us a long time to figure [Bodega] out,” said Hoffman. “It started in New York. I helped set up the one in London recently. We have it also in Portland. It shouldn’t be a totally separate arm where there’s no communication back to the people running the brands, but it needs to operate separately because the thinking is different than doing a TV spot. We want to break the internet—that’s kind of the goal. I’m not as well versed in that as people that come from that area. When we can do that right, and it’s not competition but it’s in conjunction, that’s when it works brilliantly.” Embracing diversity to add value and perspective to the work is another big talking point in the industry in recent years—though again, Hoffman would say that’s been W+K’s approach for a long time. “Having a variety of voices—I know we call that diversity now, but I’m going to say variety—that was important to Dan and David,” she said. “They wanted Janet Champ because she had a female point of view. They wanted Jim [Riswold], because he’s a messed-up sports guy, crazy knowledgeable. Dan said something once—‘Susan, when this agency reflects the consumers we’re talking to, then we’ve done it.’ Whether it be culture, whether it be gender, whether it be personality, the more you mix things up, the more interesting the work becomes.” As it’s grown, W+K also has developed a geographical and cultural diversity of its own. It’s one reason Hoffman never left—she loves to travel, and the W+K network offers lots of opportunities, all with the W+K DNA at the core. She’s spent significant time in most of the W+K offices and just returned to Portland this spring after two years in London. “The ideas and the craft around the world are all very different, and I really love that,” she said. “I remember when we moved to Amsterdam, that first new office we opened, all of us were like, ‘How are we going to do this? This is so foreign.’ But that foreignness wakes you up a bit. It’s a huge change, totally different people, even if the culture feels similar. We need to do more of that as an agency.” As for the current great industry obsession, AI, Hoffman again sees parallels to W+K’s evolution in the past—though she acknowledges it’s hard to know what AI’s full impact will be going forward. “There’s OK writing and there’s terrific writing, and hopefully the robots never get to terrific writing,” she said with a laugh. “We talk about it as a tool, but maybe our biggest challenge is, how do we actually use it well as a tool? I remember Kennedy was never able to transfer to a computer because he was such a craftsman—he did everything by hand. So maybe that’s the challenge here. How do you use that tool so well that you’re doing things better than before?” Back to the future Hoffman isn’t the only steward of W+K’s brand and culture. Even as she continues to inspire the network globally, she points to the current leadership team of Global CEO Neal Arthur and Global Chief Creative Officer Karl Lieberman as execs who also deeply understand the agency—setting it up for future success. “I don’t want to be 150 in this business,” she said with a laugh. “[Arthur and Lieberman] feel more right to push this agency forward than I think we’ve seen in the past. And if I were to say one thing specifically about them, it’s they really understand the culture of this place—and they understand business. The combo of those two things is great.” Culture, in any agency, is a mysterious thing. There’s no book on it—people get it or they don’t. And so, as Hoffman takes the stage this week to be honored in Cannes, she hopes people can see what the award really reflects—the critical task of keeping a culture alive, nurturing and protecting it, so the work can follow. Because culture, in any business, is never guaranteed to survive. “It sounds like a cult or something, but Dan did have this weird, magical sense of people,” Hoffman said. “It wasn’t like he was removed from us, but he could see it better than us. A lot of people have said, ‘He knew me better than I knew me.’ I learned that from both of those guys. We’re not cookie cutters, any of us. “The outpouring of stories [after Wieden’s death] really reminded people, or taught people, what this place is about. When [The Advertising Club of New York] did the Inspiration Series, I showed Dan’s video to the agency because I want people to understand there’s a rhyme or reason to this place. You need enough people that know the culture to keep propagating it. They have to be a part of it and then they go, ‘Oh, I get it.’ It doesn’t mean we all duplicate it, but there are some principles that, if they change, we might as well not be here.” Cannes Lions coverage Follow our live blog here Sign up here for email updates See all of the Grand Prix winners here

Susan Hoffman looks back—inside the career of employee No. 8 at Wieden+Kennedy

Featured Stories