On the morning of January 17th, 1977, Gary Gilmore was transported from his cell at Utah State Prison to a disused cannery out back, hastily pressed into service as an execution chamber. There the convicted murderer was strapped to a chair in front of a wall of sandbags. At the other end of the room, five policemen stood behind a curtain, a firing squad with guns drawn, ready to shoot through ready-made holes in the fabric and to carry out his death sentence. With a prison chaplain on hand and a physician about to cover him in a black hood, Gilmore was asked if he had any last words.
“Let’s do it!” he said.
A decade later Dan Wieden was tasked with creating an advertising slogan for Nike. He had read of Gilmore’s final moments in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and the phrase stuck with him. Initially, he figured, a pared-down “Do It!” might work for the Portland sneaker manufacturer then struggling to compete in an overcrowded marketplace with Adidas and Reebok. Eventually, after much tinkering, he decided “Just Do It” had more of a ring to it. Within a couple of years the phrase had entered the popular lexicon. Nike had overtaken its rivals and the selling of sports was never quite the same again
“You wouldn’t believe the response,” Liz Dolan, then director of Nike public relations, told the Washington Post in 1989. “We’ve got zillions of letters from consumers who’ve told us it’s made them change their lives. One woman left her husband.”
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Wieden died from complications from Alzheimer’s on September 30th. He was 77. It’s difficult to think of any other non-athlete who had such an impact on the way games and players are promoted and marketed. On April Fool’s Day 40 years ago he and David Kennedy opened Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, after reading a book titled, How To Start An Advertising Agency. Money was so tight their basement office in a run-down union building made use of a pay phone down the corridor and four employees shared one borrowed typewriter. “We began as a ship of fools,” said Wieden.
They had one major client in Nike but, in the years before he used that typewriter to bang out the tagline that sold a billion shoes, that wasn’t an easy account. “I’m Phil Knight and I don’t believe in advertising,” said the founder of the swoosh the day he met Wieden at an ice rink in Sun Valley, Idaho. Knight believed marketing began and ended with athletes wearing his products in the arena and warned the creatives never to come to him with anything that felt like or smelled like advertising. To avoid that fate, Wieden taped a photograph of Lasse Viren, the iconic Finnish long-distance runner, above his desk to serve as his conscience.
Inspiration came from strange places. In 1986, Bill Davenport and Jim Riswold, two of the company’s stalwarts, burst into his office desperate to tell him about a movie they’d seen where one of the main characters left his shoes on during sex. “Wieden,” shouted Riswold, “they were Nikes! He wouldn’t take off his Nikes!”
The film was Spike Lee’s debut She’s Gotta Have It, and out of that moment came the director’s subsequent ground-breaking television ad campaign with Michael Jordan. A series of funny commercials that humanised the greatest player of all time, turned Air Jordans into cultural collectibles, and cemented the legend of Wieden+Kennedy.
Although he loved to style the company “the island of misfit toys”, and the office eventually boasted a basketball hoop and a beer tap, they created ads for blue-chip clients that remade the industry. They also shook up the art of the sports sell, often using humour and irreverence, and somehow managing to appear anti-establishment while appealing to the mass-market. Tiger Woods announcing, “Hello world!” was one of theirs. So too another American pop culture moment involving Bo Jackson (who simultaneously starred in pro baseball and grid-iron) and Bo Diddly.
Beyond sport there was a spot where Lou Reed, the very epitome of cool, somehow shilled for Honda scooters to the soundtrack of Walk on the Wild Side without sacrificing his street credibility. Miles Davis did a star turn in the same campaign.
Wieden could take some credit for the success of ESPN too. When the now all-powerful sports network was struggling, he made a curious deal with them. Knowing what his company could do with the brand, he agreed to work the first year for costs, the second for a nominal fee and the third for what he normally charged clients. The commercials he created elevated the nightly SportsCenter and its presenters into the mainstream and contributed to it becoming appointment television across America.
A frustrated playwright, he was a voracious reader who never touched second-hand books because he believed previous owners had already stolen their souls. No, really. Not a fan of research either, he described his outfit’s success, rising to 1,400 employees and $2 billion a year in revenue, as some sort of “cosmic joke.”
While his wife reckoned him something of a cross between Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, Riswold, his most storied copywriter, used the term “a capitalist hippie”, and one advertising bigwig marked his passing by christening him, “our collective Yoda”.
“Excellence is not a formula,” said Wieden. “Excellence is the grand experiment. It ain’t mathematics, it’s jazz.”
