Dan Wieden Is... We spend a week stalking the advertising mogul around a conference in Cape Town

Dan Wieden is at a party. It’s being held in the Presidential Suite of a hotel in Cape Town and the views from the 17th floor balcony, across the city to Table Mountain, are insane. There’s a bar in one corner and decks off to one side, but no DJ. Dan and his wife arrive and stroll through the throng to a raised decking area. The party is aware that he’s here but everyone pretends not to have noticed. Be cool. The 69-year-old is the founder of the world’s largest independent advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy, that he set up in Portland, Oregon in 1982. In the early days it was a small operation; he and David Kennedy put in $500 and rented a basement room that didn’t even have a phone. “We had a payphone at the end of the hallway and we’d run down there if the damn thing rang,” he remembers, then puts on a super slick ad-land tone. “Hello Wieden + Kennedy.” He says the company’s growth baffles him. “We’re a success story that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. We’re a cosmic joke.” But even though Portland was an unlikely base from which to build an empire, it did have one interesting local firm, a sportswear company called Nike. Wieden + Kennedy started to work with Nike founder Phil Knight – he was suspicious of advertising, they (by their own admission) had no idea what they were doing. But this uncertain start matured into one of the most successful commercial/creative relationships in history as W+K found a way to translate the brand’s authentic athletic attitude into campaigns that worked. The agency now has a raft of big name clients and eight offices around the wold – having added New York, London, Delhi, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Shanghai. “That’s weird. You wake up one morning and you’re a fucking network with 1,500 people and billings in excess of three billion dollars.” He swears like a motherfucking trooper. Dan Wieden is washing his hands. He says hello and the word has four syllables – “he-l-l-o.” His voice chimes, and with his white hair and neatly trimmed beard he looks a bit like Santa repackaged by a trendy ad agency. The glint in his eye reminds me of a grandpa that sneaks you your first sip of beer. Dan Wieden is wearing a giant leaf as a hat. He’s on a tour of a vineyard in the wine country an hour outside Cape Town with rocky mountains and sun-kissed vegetation, weird plants like prickly pears. It’s hot, and the tour guide is explaining the properties of the lotus leaf: “On days like this, you can also wear it upside down as a hat.” Dan immediately plonks his on his head and walks around like this for a good 15 minutes. “I’m glad he’s got it, he burns very easily,” his wife Priscilla says. Dan’s late wife Bonnie is the person he credits for the approach that has come to define his agency. Having been fired from his job at a paper manufacturer (“I was the hippie inside a very conservative company”) he went home to break the bad news to Bonnie, then pregnant with their fourth child. She was taking washing out of the machine when he told her what happened and she replied: “Something’ll come up.” “She gave me what I could not give myself – permission to fail. That’s the heart and soul of this agency. You have to be able to fail if you’re going to do anything with life.” This sense of freedom helped Dan and David develop a creative culture that’s unique. “It was so simple and so crazy,” he says, and the people who’d come to Portland – “the most ridiculous place you could possibly imagine” – were those “who’d been fired everywhere else or kids just out of school.” Wieden + Kennedy didn’t rip up the rule book; they just ignored it. “We began as a ship of fools and I believe that’s why we’ve succeeded. We were naive, we were stupid but sometimes stupid can work for you. When you start believing your own historic wisdom you’re not stupid any more, you’re dead.” They soon realised though that financially they couldn’t compete with the big agencies and found a lot of their best talents were getting poached. Their response was to create a place of work that meant something more than dollars. “Fuck the money. We developed a culture so weird and so sticky it would hurt your damn soul to leave the place,” he says. “It’s the culture that lifts the people. It’s the people who make the work. It’s the work that makes the relationships between good companies and their customers.” And there you have the genesis of the Wieden + Kennedy mission statement, which begins: “We are an independent, creatively driven advertising agency that creates strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers.” It goes on: “We believe that it doesn’t matter where, how or in what medium an idea is expressed, you still have to start with a good one.” Dan Wieden is shouting at 3,000 people. He’s has just been introduced as “advertising royalty” at the Design Indaba conference and as he makes his way to the stage the crowd are on their feet. “Don’t you dare!” he yells, pointing back at the