'We are practical and don't worry about competition'

The CLIO Awards, an international advertising and design competition honouring creative excellence and innovation, will present Dan Wieden, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 50th Anniversary CLIO Awards in May. The award recognises the contribution of an individual who takes the industry forward. Suvi Dogra and Sapna Agarwal caught up with Wieden at the Goa Ad Fest.

How does it feel to have won the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Award? 
(A broad smile followed by a long pause) I don’t really know what to say.

Was Nokia instrumental in bringing you to the country since India is a big market for the company? You entered India only late in 2007? 
India has become increasingly important and this market was on our mind for the last 10 years. Nokia is a good starting point for us in the country but not a factor that brought us to India. As is the case with our offices around the world, we started out with a small office and worked towards making it profitable.

When we open an office, we usually bleed for several years before we make any money. The fact that in less than two years of operations, our Delhi office has become profitable just shows what we can achieve here in the future.

W+K is the first independent American agency to enter India and is up against stiff competition. How do you plan to build brands here? 
We are more practical in our approach and don’t worry about competition. We believe in investing behind understanding the brands we work on the cultural idiosyncrasies of a company. You cannot build powerful brands at the back of inferior products. Products are proof of brand relevance. Advertising certainly adds value to any good brand. 

Agencies the world over are focusing on the BRIC nations. While you have already entered India, what is the plan for the other three? 
India is a major economy we wanted to enter. We are now looking at operations in Brazil and less on Russia and China as of now. 

W+K has created work that has more youth appeal. Is that a conscious strategy? 
Most of our brands have youth as the target consumer. So, it is imperative that we should get the message out in what appeals to this consumer segment. But for brands such as Coca-Cola, the red can belongs to a larger consumer base. A good agency needs to pay attention to such details in assuming different characters for the brand. 

How do you see yourself dealing with the challenges of recession? 
In recession, people turn to product and price advertising but it is about brand advertising. Business is not about money but about culture and relationships. There will always be financial crisis and ethnology. If we are good, we will be here. 

During these unstable times, what would your advice be to marketers? 
I am not an oracle. There are some scary things happening and some fascinating. But the world that we were born in the 1980s has turned upside down. We have to set aside all the structures that we have put in place and innovate. 

Can you share with us what these structural innovations mean? 
We have put in place a W+K 12, a lab to solve problems. In the first year, we recruited 12 people and put them together in one team to come up with brand solutions as against the conventional way of teams of two — of one copy writer and art director.

This experiment worked well for us. We have now created two teams of five and seven people who have done some award-winning work on brands such as Caroline, an animated movie whose pre-launch hype and viral publicity campaign saw the revenues of the movie double in its opening weekend. 

Do you live by the line you created — Just do it — that has become synonymous with brand Nike? 
(Laughs) As I grow older I may not be able to ‘Just do it’, but ‘Do what I can.’