Kennedy retired from the agency in 1993, although he continued to turn up at the office several days a week until the pandemic began. (It’s called Kennedy.) Long after his colleagues shifted to computers, he still preferred designing with a pen, an X-Acto knife and a cutting board. His handwriting inspired his colleagues to create a typeface used internally. Despite winning nearly every major industry accolade within its first decade, the agency lined its walls with portraits of employees rather than awards. He was also known for mentoring younger colleagues. His habit of carrying a ring of keys dangling from his belt loop led at least one executive’s wife to mistake him for a janitor. Kennedy appeared in the office every day in a uniform of faded bluejeans and a denim shirt, leading employees to give him 50 pairs of Levi’s pants on his 50th birthday. “Two dudes up in Oregon doing this wild stuff - we got lucky.”įor years Mr. “The bigger Nike became, the bigger we became,” Mr. Much of Wieden+Kennedy’s success was tied to Nike and to popular campaigns like “ Bo Knows,” featuring the baseball and football player Bo Jackson, and “ Mars and Mike,” with the filmmaker Spike Lee and the basketball star Michael Jordan. Wieden’s father, who had run Gerber Advertising in Portland, helped them with the basics of running a business. At one point they worked out of a restaurant, buying coffees to avoid being kicked out. They started Wieden+Kennedy out of a labor union hall with a borrowed card table as a desk and used a pay phone down the hall. Wieden later moved to the William Cain agency, where they worked on advertising plywood for a lumber purveyor and making pitches for a small but growing company from nearby Beaverton - Nike.įeeling creatively stifled, Mr. “Instead of quietly riding the Chicago Northwestern train into work, he was now driving an old Chevy pickup truck with Miles Davis or Flatt and Scruggs playing on the radio,” his daughter Erinn Kennedy said in an email. In 1979, he was hired in Portland as an art director for the agency then known as McCann-Erickson, where Mr. But after more than 16 years in the city, he ached to return west. Kennedy worked at agencies including Young & Rubicam, Leo Burnett, Needham, and Benton & Bowles. He is survived by his wife his daughters, Cathlin, Erinn and Siobhan and a son, Brendan. They married in 1963, moved to Chicago and had five children. Kennedy met Kathleen Murphy in 1961 in Colorado through a fraternity brother who was dating her sister. He also served six years in the Marine Corps Reserve. He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1962 with a degree in printmaking and metal sculpture. Kennedy traced while learning to draw.Īfter spending a day and night on an oil rig, he decided to try college. His childhood hero was Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, whose work Mr. At first he wanted to be a geologist, but art had a stronger pull. His first job, at age 13, was as an apprentice welder. He had what his Advertising Hall of Fame profile called “an idyllic, Tom Sawyer childhood, fishing trout streams and rivers he had no idea were world-class” in Oklahoma and other states along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains. For Honda in 1985, the pair put out grainy footage of Lou Reed, the former frontman of the Velvet Underground, telling viewers, “Don’t settle for walking” while perched on a Honda scooter, all to the tune of his 1973 hit song, “Walk on the Wild Side.”ĭavid Franklin Kennedy was born on May 31, 1939, in Wichita, Kan., the only child of Melinda Jane (Spoon) Kennedy, a bank administrator, and James Franklin Kennedy, a second-generation wildcatter. Wieden’s slogan “Just do it,” featuring an 80-year-old man named Walt Stack who ran 17 miles each morning. Kennedy was the creative director on the first Nike commercial to include Mr. While many rivals have been subsumed by gargantuan holding companies, the agency remained at his death an independent shop, with eight offices around the world and about 1,500 employees. Kennedy started in Oregon with Dan Wieden in 1982, elevated Portland’s creative cachet at a time when advertising was mostly associated with New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The cause was heart failure, said Jeff Selis, a former Wieden+Kennedy producer and a family friend. 10 at his home in Estacada, Ore., near Portland. Kennedy, a founder of the innovative advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, which created famous campaigns featuring Nike’s slogan “Just do it” and Lou Reed on a Honda scooter, died on Oct.
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