Business 2.0

Just Do It. Again.


Dan Wieden created Nike's famous slogan, and he's been pushing the limits ever since. Now he's blending advertising and entertainment into a new art form -- "branded content. "Most advertising agencies line the walls of their offices with samples of their own pithy sales pitches. But at the pristine, airy headquarters of Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., there are few ads in sight, and the featured attraction on any given day might be a poetry reading or a modern dance recital, performed by local artists-in-residence and staged in an amphitheater at the center of the building. "You never know what you'll see. Could be a guy jumping through a plate of glass," says Dan Wieden, the agency's iconoclastic 57-year-old co-founder and president. "I like having that uncertainty here."

Business 2.0

Are You Overpaying for Content Management?


Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software to manage their websites and other documents -- and getting dubious returns. There's got to be a better way. The numbers aren't pretty. According to a Jupiter survey of chief information officers at companies with more than $50 million in revenue, 53 percent will have deployed new content-management systems by the end of this year. Given the expense involved -- a high-end CMS like Vignette can cost upwards of $100,000 for the software alone, plus another multiple of that in installation costs -- you'd think these companies would be choosing wisely and getting exactly what they need. Unfortunately, that's not always the case.