David F. Kennedy, Whose Ad Agency Put Nike on the Map, Dies at 82

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He also served 6 years in the Marine Corps reserves.

Mr. Kennedy satisfied Kathleen Murphy in 1961 in Colorado by way of a fraternity brother who was relationship her sister. They married in 1963, moved to Chicago and experienced five young children. He is survived by his wife his daughters Cathlin, Erinn and Siobhan and a son, Brendan. Another son, Ian, died in 2016.

In Chicago, Mr. Kennedy worked at companies which includes Young & Rubicam, Leo Burnett, Needham and Benton & Bowles. But immediately after additional than 16 years in the town, he ached to return west. In 1979, he was employed in Portland as an art director for the company that was then recognized as McCann-Erickson, the place Mr. Wieden was working as a copywriter.

“Instead of quietly using the Chicago Northwestern train into do the job, he was now driving an outdated Chevy pickup truck with Miles Davis or Flatt and Scruggs enjoying on the radio,” his daughter Erinn Kennedy claimed in an email.

Later on, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Wieden moved to the William Cain company, wherever they worked on advertising and marketing plywood for a lumber purveyor and generating pitches for a smaller but growing business from nearby Beaverton — Nike.

Experience creatively stifled, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Wieden struck out on their have. They started out Wieden+Kennedy out of a labor union corridor with a borrowed card table as a desk and utilised a pay back telephone down the hall. At a single level they worked out of a cafe, shopping for coffees to stay clear of staying kicked out.

Nike was their to start with customer. Mr. Wieden’s father, who had run the Gerber Marketing company in Portland, aided them with the principles of managing a enterprise. It grew quickly.

A great deal of Wieden+Kennedy’s success was tied to Nike and to preferred strategies like “Bo Is familiar with,” featuring the baseball and football player Bo Jackson, and “Mars and Mike,” with the filmmaker Spike Lee and the basketball star Michael Jordan.