Wieden & Kennedy

With the season of love/loneliness upon us, W+K Portland has its design studio in the holiday spirit with a series of letterpress Valentine’s Day cards.

Now, these cards aren’t of the “I Choo-Choo Choose You” variety. No, most of these are best for expressing your cupidity with octopi “hugging,” rabbits ready to pounce on one other or text messages declaring, “I Fucking Love You.”

So, if your significant other is tired of soft-focus photos of roses or pictures of Spider-Man saying, “I’m caught in your web, Valentine,” adorning your cards, consider switching it up this year. Hopefully, we’ll get Terry Crews in a romantic Old Spice spot as we near the 14th. Check out one more Valentine card after the jump.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

A couple of tips came in this late afternoon telling us that W+K’s six-year relationship with Target has come to an end. Our pals at the Denver Egotist tell us that sources at Target are saying it’s so, though we’ve yet to hear what’s happening from Wieden’s end. Well, if it is the case, at least we’ll always Maria Bramford haunting our dreams.

Update: Well, it indeed looks like Target followed the lead of a fellow retailer and dropped its long-time agency according to AdAge.

Update 2: Here are statements from both camps:

Target:

“Target is proud of what we accomplished with the Wieden+Kennedy team during our six-year partnership. Looking forward, we are focused on continuing to identify fresh and innovative ways to tell Target’s brand story, and will leverage both our internal expertise and our strong roster of agency partners to help accomplish our marketing goals in 2012 and beyond,” says Shawn Gensch, vice president of marketing and head of partner management, Target.

Wieden and Kennedy:

“It is never easy to part ways with a client,” says Tom Blessington, managing director of W+K Portland.  “We are proud of our six year history with Target and wish them the best. It was a great creative opportunity to work with such an iconic brand, said Susan Hoffman executive creative director of W+K Portland.  We love the pace and the dynamics of working in the retail space.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a great ESPN spot from W+K, hasn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I got a few good chuckles in while watching last year’s “Jumbotron Marriage Proposal.” But, I still yearn for the days when I would hear things like “Yeah, the game was boring, but did you see that new ESPN/SportsCenter spot they aired during the commercial break? It almost made watching that travesty worthwhile.”

“Shake On It” marks a subtle new take on W+K NY’s long-running “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” campaign. In the past, we’ve seen spots showcasing fanatics doing outrageously flamboyant things in the name of sports because they want to. In the above spot, we see these people doing similar stupid feats because they have to. After all, it’s written in the Man Handbook that “If you make a bet and lose, you have to accept the consequences.” If you bet that you’d dance around in a dangerous part of town while wearing a diaper and bonnet if you favorite team lost, then you have to do it. That’s what being a grownup is all about.

And, before you say that these kinds of extreme bets rarely happen, I give you this poor bastard’s thigh tattoo of centaur Tim Tebow as evidence otherwise. Credits after the jump.

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Wieden + Kennedy global interactive ECD Iain Tait (left) is among four execs at the agency who can now add partner to their titles. Joining him are W+K Portland managing director Tom Blessington and ECD Mark Fitzloff as well as London MD Neil Christie. This marks the first time in two years that W+K’s made partner additions, and as a result, the four new ones join a list that includes Dan Wieden (obviously), Dave Luhr, Susan Hoffman, Bill Davenport, John Jay, Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth.

While Tait’s only been with W+K since 2010, having joined from his shop Poke London, Blessington’s racked up 21 years at the agency, during which time he ran the Nike accounts in Portland and Amsterdam and served as the first managing director of the agency’s New York office. As for Christie, he’s served as W+K London’s managing director since 2004 while Fitzloff started as a copywriter at the agency back in 1999.

Well, it looks like our tipsters over the weekend were accurate as we’ve received confirmation that Ginny Golden and Christine Miller-Sheehan have joined Wieden+Kennedy from AKQA D.C., where they served as creative director and director of strategy, respectively. Golden (left) officially started on Dec. 1 at W+K’s Portland office as interactive CD on Procter & Gamble. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on the exact title and start date for Miller-Sheehan, who spent two-and-a-half years at AKQA and spent time on the account/strategy side at Leo Burnett and BBDO prior.

As for Golden, who spent 11 years at AKQA, the creative won a Titanium at Cannes 2010 for the Volkswagen GTI launch, which sources say got her notice from the W+K camp. Her new boss, W+K’s global interactive ECD Iain Tait, says in a statement, “I’ve admired Ginny’s work from afar for ages. As soon as we met her we knew she’d be a great addition to the team. We’re all excited to see what she’s going to bring to W+K.”

 

From W+K New York comes a new NBA Lockout 2011-themed TV spot for Nike subsidiary, Air Jordan.

Yesterday, word broke that stalled labor negotiations and collective bargaining disagreements between the NBA’s players and owners will chop another two weeks off of the 2011-2012 season, meaning that, at earliest, it will be more than a month until the league finally starts. The entire season remains in jeopardy, and while many of the NBA’s stars are signing contracts to play in leagues overseas, some are considering alternate career paths in furniture store stockroom management.

Of course, NBA commissioner David Stern is keeping a tight leash on both sides of the negotiations, to the point that anyone who even utters the phrase “lockout” following an adjective expressing any sort of negativity will be fined and punished. It doesn’t even matter if you were the league’s best player and greatest ambassador of the game worldwide. If you so much as compliment someone on the other side of the talks, it could cost you $100K (or maybe your first born child).

Sports apparel brands with an all-star spokesroster are left in a difficult position. How do you keep people interested in a game that isn’t even being played at the professional level? As W+K and Air Jordan have reasoned, the lockout cannot be ignored. Rather, it should be screamed without even being mentioned. So, here we see three of NBA’s biggest stars, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony, as they get as much playing time in as possible in the NBA’s absence, even if it’s against less than competitive opponents. Why is Melo being schooled from long range by some Jewish Under 40 league sharpshooter? As Air Jordan says, it’s for the Love of the Game. And, after watching this, it’s comforting to be able to respect at least one side of the labor dispute. Now, to ask same question that’s driving everyone in Chicago to tears: Can we please have another season and not waste one of Derrick Rose‘s best years on something as silly as this? PLEASE?

Multiple sources are telling us that Wieden + Kennedy Portland creative director Sheena Brady is leaving her longtime gig. When asked, the W+K camp has been suspiciously quiet/unresponsive to our inquiries about the matter and calls to Brady directly leave us with some odd message that says that the “extension hasn’t been activated.” As Arsenio once said, these are things that make you go, “hmmmm.” Anyhow, Brady, a former AgencySpy “Hot Ad (Wo)Man of the Day,” has worked on several accounts during her time at W+K including Nike and Coca-Cola. Some of the Alaskan native’s most recent work includes the Nike “Black Mamba” film (as co-copywriter). We’re double and triple-checking on her apparent impending departure, so we’ll let you know what’s doing as soon as we hear. We’re hoping she stays aboard because we kinda like the ‘Mamba’ stuff.

Last month, W+K and Heineken turned a NoHo billboard into an outdoor music venue for TV on the Radio (much to the chagrin of Shiner). Well, it seems as though Heineken’s “occasionally perfect” combination of indie rock and imported beer is going on a nationwide tour, with its second stop in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood.

Home to the never perfect Chicago Cubs, Wrigleyville is not as full of hipsters and indie nerds as the above video suggests. In fact, its three chief exports might be backwards trucker hat-wearing tourists, STDs and Rufinol. But, it turns out that all you need is popular Canadian indie rock band Broken Social Scene to get bespectacled music fans to brave the cruel weather and travel from Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square to Wrigleyville against their better judgment. After all, the area surrounding Wrigley Field is commonly viewed as being Old Style country, and many Chicagoans (at least Wrigleyville residents) will tell you with great certainty that Old Style is somehow from the Windy City despite the type on the can saying otherwise.

In any case, thousands of fans showed up to the billboard on Wednesday night, despite the cold weather, to rock out with a solid live band. A couple people even danced, which is a rarity in Chicago. So, credit Heineken for at least getting a few disengaged people to jump up and down for a while.

As we deduced a long time ago (ok, only two weeks), former CP+B interactive ECD Matt O’Rourke is on his way to Wieden+Kennedy. He tells us, “I can confirm I’m taking the road trip to end all road trips and then starting at W+K Portland on 9/15 as an Interactive Creative Director. I’ve wanted to work with Iain for a long time, and it’s nice to finally be getting to do it. Susan and Mark are two of the most well regarded and creative people I’ve ever met, and getting to work closely with their new head of digital strategy Zach Gallagher is the icing.” We bid thee well, mon frer.

At 45, copywriter Julie Bowman is looking for an opportunity to stay relevant in the industry to which she’s dedicated the last two decades of her life. To do that, she feels her best option is to go back to school and learn the technologicalskills she needs to increase her career’s longevity.

The 13 coveted spots at Wieden + Kennedy’s experiment W+K12 ad school might seemed better suited toward young creatives who looking to get their start in the industry, someone like Kate Digilio who demonstrated her web design skills by creating a faux-version of the school’s website. It’s expected now that everyone who wants to start their career must have the sort of digital marketing prowess, something that gives increasing value to young college kids who grew up regularly using the Internet. The road to a career in advertising is a journey that Bowman began traveling in 1989, and 20+ years in an industry known to swallow people whole (and be prejudiced toward women) might seem like a stunning success to middle-aged people looking to leave the industry to start a second career. Not Bowman, who says “I want to keep doing it. And as long as I do, I want to be the best at it.”

In a world where marketing is dominated by 20-somethings who tend to burn out by Bowman’s age, why not help her dream come true? Interested parties can sign this petition which aggressively asks W+K execs, “Let Julie in!” How much does Bowman want this? “I’ll have another 25 years before they try to make me retire,” she says. “I’m not done yet.  I don’t want to go quietly.”