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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

An Adventure with Wieden+Kennedy and Brandon Thornton (Class Speaker Prep)


            On Monday night, I attended Brandon Thornton’s presentation on finding your voice.  Partially because it was extra credit for both my Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications class, partially because it was about finding your voice (and I definitely struggle with that), and partially because I wanted a bit of prep before his Advertising presentation on Tuesday.  Here’s a bit of what I learned from the presentation, as well as from a bit of research…

            Brandon Thornton is the Lead Strategic Planner at Wieden+Kennedy, specifically on the Nike basketball account.  He is from Richmond, VA and is a Virginia Tech graduate.  Upon graduation from Tech, he took the first job he could, and worked for UPS, solving shipment issues.  He was not all that enthused to be working there and eventually decided to apply to VCU’s Brand Center.  From there, he was a store manager for American Apparel, and after many attempts, he finally reached his goal of working for Wieden+Kennedy.  He started as an intern, but has moved up to his dream of being the Lead Strategic Planner for the Nike Basketball account.

            As far as Wieden+Kennedy, I had never heard of it (I know, I’m pretty out of the loop in the advertising world).  But after researching it, I realized that I am very familiar with their work.  Obviously, I am familiar with the brand Nike, and have seen many of their advertisements.  Wieden+Kennedy has also worked on the Levi’s, Velveeta, Old Spice, Target, Diet Coke, and many other accounts.  Recently they have done the Old Spice advertisement with NFL player Greg Jennings, Facebook’s first ever advertisement, and Procter and Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” advertisements during the Olympics just to name a few.

With all of this information, here are my questions…

Toying with going to grad school eventually myself, did you feel that you needed to attend some sort of graduate school in order to achieve your goals?  Why or why not?

I know that Nike Basketball was your dream, but now that you’ve reached it, have you decided on a new goal?

Are there certain tests you use to evaluate a creative?

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