Between them, Ryan O’Rourke, Alberto Ponte, and Dan Sheniak helped create some of the most iconic Nike ads for the better part of two decades. Now they’re opening up a new ad shop for any other brand who may want to tap into that expertise.
The two former Wieden+Kennedy global creative directors (O’Rourke and Ponte), and former global media director (Sheniak) have launched Someplace, a new Los Angeles-based independent shop offering brand and creative strategy, brand identity and design, creative development, production, as well as media and communications strategy.
“We wanted to challenge ourselves in a new way,” says Sheniak. “What does our next chapter look like? How do we push ourselves and make ourselves uncomfortable to create something? From there, we just started getting excited about what we could dream up together.”
The trio have been behind iconic global Nike campaigns like 2012’s “Find Your Greatness” for the 2012 Olympics, 2018’s “Dream Crazy” featuring Colin Kaepernick, and 2020’s amazing “You Can’t Stop Sport.” They left W+K Portland last year, and have quietly been building Someplace in L.A., with a variety of brand projects, including a collaboration between Moncler and Roc Nation.
With Someplace, the co-founders are positioning themselves as a creative specialty shop for huge campaigns or smaller projects, global brands and new start-ups. Perhaps the most significant detail is that they will personally have their hands on all the work.
One common ad agency stereotype is that senior creatives are used to win brand business, then junior teams typically work on it. While that wasn’t the case at W+K, Ponte says that things do inevitably change once you get to a certain level of seniority. “We always like being close to the work,” says Ponte. “And as soon as you take a managerial role, it’s like 80% HR. So I think this is a way to keep close to the work. And there is a benefit of having such an experienced team work directly with clients.”
For Sheniak, the combination of two creatives and a media person makes their particular partnership unique. “I think that was partly what made our work so special, having an obsession to make incredible work and ideas, and expressing it in many different, interesting ways,” he says. “How do you breakthrough? I do think it’s a time where great work and showing up in really interesting ways, is something people, the industry, and brands are craving right now.”
O’Rourke says that while the continual fragmentation of media is a constant source of challenge for brands, it also presents exciting opportunity. “The combination of coming up with the big idea, then figuring out where to put it in the world, it’s so open now that it feels like that’s where a lot of the fun is,” says O’Rourke. “It’s exciting to think about how far you can push it. I think that’s one of the reasons we thought this would be interesting.”
After 20 years in Portland, Oregon, the shift to Los Angeles is also part of the fresh start, and the perfect place to collaborate with a variety of different creative partners and industries. “Technology, art, entertainment, music, this city feels really exciting to us, in terms of where things are happening, it felt like a really cool place to build something,” says Sheniak.
Someplace is just the latest agency to be founded by Wieden+Kennedy vets. Among its predecessors are 72andSunny, Anomaly, Superconnector Studios, Cartwright, and Callen. The new agency comes at a compelling time for smaller independent creative shops, when their value may be less in the scale of production, but in its ability to generate effective and impactful ideas, and collaborate with in-house brand teams and other partners to execute them.
Despite their pedigree, the three are clear that Someplace is for brands of any size looking to do exciting work. “The fact we’ve done Nike global campaigns for the World Cup tends to overshadow a lot of the small work we’ve done,” says O’Rourke. “It just has to be fun and interesting. People ask us, ‘What’s your dream client?’ Well, we’re looking for the next Phil Knight.”
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