Dan Wieden, 56, is one of the most respected creative directors in the world, a precise and concise thinker, and what's more, a highly affable gent. Wieden was in Buenos Aires speaking at the 2001 Ibero-American Advertising Festival (FIAP); his speech encouraged creatives to shun global culture and instead connect with their local markets on a more personal level. Prior to the speech, Boards interrupted his healthy-looking breakfast to pester him about global advertising and creativity.

Boards: So what do you make of Latin American advertising?

Wieden: I think Latin America for Nike is a real potential growth area, but there are economic areas holding it back so it's a little tough.

Boards: Do North American commercials from W+K get aired in Latin America?

Wieden: I was astonished that "Freestyle" was not played down here, but apparently it's on some Web sites, so everyone down here was already asking me about it. The ad industry is incestuous, with everybody trading information all the time. People down here seem so hungry for information on what is happening in the industry, whereas up in Portland, we kind of dive into our own hole, forget the rest of the industry and try to make stuff that pleases us.

Boards: How did "Freestyle" come about?

Wieden: For over a year now we've been fiddling around with the idea of doing a musical play. We wanted to base it on the street game in New York and hip-hop music. (W+K creative) Jimmy Smith came up with a story line and we started getting some investors together and composed this thing called "Ball." As a result of some of the work we'd been doing for this project we presented it to Nike, and they were interested in it too. So what you are seeing from the commercial is basically derived from the play. The commercial was so well received, we approached MTV about showing the video, which is kind of a video, and kind of not.

Boards: The ad industry is as global as its clients these days. Do you have any plans to open new shops?

Wieden: There are no plans to open any new shops. We've not grown through acquisitions. Instead, we take a couple of our people to town, hire folks from the local area and try to do some kind of hybrid thing. It's kind of an expensive proposition but it's more organic to our culture.

Boards: How was W+K born?

Wieden: We opened the agency in 1982. Kennedy and I met in McCann, Portland and they were going to move down to Atlanta. Portland wasn't exactly a hotbed of ad agencies then so we joined a small firm, then left there and grabbed Nike, which billed like a million bucks a year. Our greatest feat has been keeping up with this monster that has been growing extremely rapidly.

Boards: And the ads seem to win buckets of awards too.

Wieden: I am not really into awards and I never have been. I know creatives find them important but I worry sometimes that awards shows end up perpetuating a kind of advertising. And the catalogs that list all the winners off become sort of a bible, especially for young people in the business. Often times it ends up putting the brakes on experimentation and perpetuates styles.

I worry sometimes that the West has dominated the industry for so long and it runs a lot of the shows. So the standards of what is good advertising is established in the industrialized world and then exported around the world, so you get people imitating styles that may or may not be appropriate to their culture, or, are a corruption of their cultural values.

Boards: Do you think advertising has a responsibility to cultural integrity?

Wieden: People have a responsibility not to do this. I think advertising is completely amoral at its best and at its worst, it's completely immoral.

Boards: But it's still amusing, right?

Wieden: Immorality and amorality are always amusing.

Boards: What do you think of the claims that TV is a dying medium?

Wieden: The advertising industry chats about shit endlessly, and pretty soon they just have nothing more to say. The least little sign that something may be happening gets blown into another revolutionary change in the way the world operates. I think it's overhyped. I think it's going to be a long time before TV ads cease to be as impactful as they are in the marketplace, but there is going to be a lot of experimentation in other forms.

Boards: What do you see as the prime difference between network and independent agencies' creative work?

Wieden: A lot of it depends on the environment that is created. In any network, some of the offices can crank really easily, some have more difficult projects.

I think it's really easy to generalize about large agency networks and it's probably in my best interest to do that, but you can see some startlingly good work coming out of them. I am not sure how that happens. In our place, a lot of times it's the small project nobody is paying attention to that really becomes special, because people just left it alone and it did its own thing.

This may be totally self-serving but I do think the larger agency networks built through acquisitions have some enormous bottom line issues, especially when the economy starts going south. And in order to make those margins, keeping their clients happy and placated is not just a recreational venture, they have to look at this seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the creatives to adjust to what their clients want to do.

And for better or worse, being an independent shop that doesn't have those margins to meet, our relationships with our clients tend to be pretty feisty in good times and bad. We tend to attract clients that want that kind of relationship; they don't see service as the primary function of an ad agency. Producing a product at the end of the day is what we were hired to do. That's the view from our side of things. We are probably less risk adverse.