Nike and Weiden+Kennedy split?

Tuesday morning Nike acknowledged that it has plans to seek out other advertising agencies to add to its roster. Nike has worked with Portland based Weiden+Kennedy for a very long time and the firm will most likely stay as a “primary agency” but the sneaker giant will be looking at other firms to help keep its image fresh in the eyes of loyal customers. Weiden+Kennedy are known for their edgy and sometimes controversial ads like the one above of English soccer player Wayne Rooney is in no danger of losing its foothold in the advertising world.

Nike and Weiden+Kennedy have been working together for quite some time now. This break is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. Nike has looked elsewhere in the past in regards to it’s advertising programs. In 1984 Nike gave it’s Olympic advertising program to a firm by the name of Chait/Day. This is not uncommon when you advertising budget is in the hundreds of millions. It is reported that last year Nike spent around 220 million on Weiden+Kennedy advertising. Not bad when you think that just under 25 years ago Weiden was little more than a card-table and a small room.

Weiden+Kennedy is in no danger of loosing out. While Nike was at the top of it’s list in terms of clients they enjoy relationships with a number of Fortune 500 companies. Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Starbucks just to name a few. Like I said earlier, Nike is likely not to sever ties completely. Weiden did come up with their montra for many years “just do it”. They have been a corner stone of Nike’s success. To leave them behind completely would not be a good move. I do understand their need for diversification. Tapping into new agencies means new ideas.

Not that Weiden+Kennedy’s ideas were bad. Quite the opposite. Weiden+Kennedy have come up with some of the most legendary slogans and ad campaigns Nike has had. The ads above are from a Nike Women’s campaign showing a more real side of women’s fitness. The ads were generally well received, showing the undainty shoulders and big butts. The women in these ads weren’t ashamed of them as they shouldn’t be. Perhaps taking a cue from Dove brand soap with their real women models this is a refreshing look that Nike has taken. Nike could be changing it’s strategy to a more interactively based approach. They have been experimenting lately with with new ways of communicating with their customers utilizing the web2.0 movement. User powered discussion sites like the Nike+iPod and soccer initiates have gone very well and with more and more people getting their information from the web this only makes sense. It seems to me that traditional advertising has taken a bit of a back seat to new ways of attracting attention. one of those ways is defiantly web based user groups.

The days of huge corporate sponsorships are far from over. The likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Vick, and Labron James have made that quite clear. What is not so clear is how these athletes influence buying power of today’s society. I’m not sure that I buy my shoes based on the athletes who wear them any more. When I have my eye on a new pair of kicks I check them out on-line. I search them on good old Google and see what I can find. In terms of search engine marketing these user powered sites are the next big thing. If you have a group of dedicated people chatting it up on your site about the next cool Nike’s they are generating a huge amount of indexable content. This content means a lot to search engines like our good friend Google. The better the ranking in the search engines the more people look at your page. This could very well translate into sales for Nike and you know how they like those sales. What I am getting at is that the landscape has changed within the fields of advertising and marketing. The printed page may no longer be king and to keep pace with other companies Nike seems to have taken a different approach. It’s a pretty big gamble, only time will tell if it works.