Wieden+Kennedy Sydney is Ready to Lure New Clients and Aussie Expats

One-year-old Wieden+Kennedy Sydney is ready to expand beyond foundation client McDonald’s Australia and global client Nike, outlining an ambition to attract brands to its roster that boast heritage but need reinvigoration.

In his first sit-down interview since moving to Australia to set up the outpost, managing director Matt Owen toldLBB if year one was about localising two global icons in Wieden+Kennedy and McDonald’s, year two is about offering to “make the best work of our lives” for a bigger roster of clients.

“We very much started as an outpost to McDonald's,” Matt said, a little over a year after the agency exclusively told LBB about its plans for the market.

“That is still our number one priority and will continue to be -- they are our founding client and we obviously have the opportunity to do brilliant work with them. But we are now moving into a space where we are a true Wieden+Kennedy office, which means we are doing a bit of work with Nike. We are looking for the right other potential opportunities, both within our own network [and] also potentially some of our own Australian-based clients.

“That isn't to say that we're going to say yes to every pitch. We want to be super deliberate with who and what we go after, and I think that is [brands] that maybe have got a heritage or a bit of fandom that have maybe lost their voice or their point of view a little bit. In my time at Wiedens, when we do our best work is when we're uncovering the hidden gem and then blowing it back out into the world.”

The First Year

Matt has spent almost 14 years at Wieden+Kennedy, “and it's hardly ever felt like I've worked a day in that time”. He started at the London office in 2012 as an account manager and climbed the ranks to head of account management. That’s the role he held in the 200-person agency when he was tapped to move his family across the world and set up a Sydney office from scratch. It was already a risk; Matt upped the stakes further with a permanent reminder: two tattoos -- a McDonald’s chicken nugget on his bicep (he chose the boot shape) and the Nike swoosh on his right ankle.

Both remind him of his commitment to the office’s first clients. “What a founding client McDonald's is, continues to be, hopefully will be forever. They are amazing.”

A big agency name servicing a big-name client wasn’t a guaranteed recipe for success, though. As Matt said, “We're not arrogant enough to believe that just being called Wieden+Kennedy meant we were gonna come here and it was gonna be a success and it will just all fall into place. There have been loads of great agencies that have moved to Australia and haven't necessarily smashed it.”

Wiedens had to carve out a niche for itself in a cluttered market teeming with independents. “Independents are having a moment here, maybe moreso than anywhere else,” Matt confirmed.

“And as an independent, that is incredibly exciting for us. We're in a pretty unique situation where we are truly independent but are also truly a network. We're 10 offices, but we really are one W+K. Yes, we have a global McDonald's team that we work with … and I couldn't tell you where they stop and we finish. Everything feels like a super fluid thing.

“In coming here, we wanted it to feel like the creative industries as a whole, beyond just advertising, creative people of Sydney and maybe Australia, they felt like it was a good addition to the place. That Wieden+Kennedy here was going to help the place feel more creative as a whole, and that should be good for all of us.”

He knew the business would act like a startup and the pace would be “kind of crazy,” but also that it “had the might of the network behind us. It never really felt like it was just us.” Building an on-the-ground team started with hiring creative leaders: Roy Leibowitz and Chris Wilson.

Next up was creating “the right conditions for us to do brilliant work”: an agency culture. On Matt’s third day in the job, the agency celebrated Founder’s Day globally, and 14 people in Sydney ran around the city recreating internet memes. In October, the agency hosted its inaugural Hallow-wiedens party, which it hopes to turn into a yearly event. A Yagoona bake-off (named after the first Australian McDonald’s store) is a regular occurrence. Those bonding moments are underpinned by a shared, global ambition: “do the best work of our lives.”

“When we started, that was the thing that we just held centre to everything we do. We all sat in one room and that was kind of amazing. I remember just saying, 'You know what, there's going to come a moment where we don't all sit in the same room and we'll probably miss that a little bit.' And that's true.”

There’s “a lot of pressure” that accompanies a north star that ambitious, though, because “it's this amazingly freeing thing, but also it's an anchor at the same time.”

“It's like, 'Okay, wow, that means I haven't done that yet, and I need to achieve it again today and again the next day.'”

W+K Sydney is still hiring -- it added five people to its creative and production teams in January -- has a run of work under its belt, and a headcount of about 40. “Now,” Matt says, “it's like, 'Okay, the conditions are pretty much there.’”

He will measure this year’s success by evaluating how the agency contributes to the local creative industry, makes brands culturally relevant, expands its client roster, and tempts Aussie expats to move home. The British import says ‘bring them home’ has become an internal KPI of sorts.

“There's loads of brilliant Australians that are currently working all around the world. We would love to be doing a high enough standard of work that some of those guys are like, 'You know what, maybe I could go and live in Australia again.'”

The McDonald’s Work

In late 2024, McDonald’s Australia ran the closed pitch for its creative account, as revealed by LBB, composed of agencies already on its global roster. Wiedens was the only contender not to have an existing local presence; it beat out Droga5 and a proposed model similar to that of Telstra’s. Its remit started with the McCafe and Chicken business, and over the course of the year, McDonald’s Australia transitioned the entire creative account to W+K, ending a 53-year relationship with DDB Sydney.

The agency already worked with the QSR leader in the US and Canada, so the Sydney team had a foundation: chase fan truths.

“The fan-to-fan thing,” Matt explained, “is the thing that we all hold sacrosanct to all of the ideas and all of the work. If it starts to feel like we're getting too into advertising constructs or we're telling people too much about what to feel rather than just showing we understand how they feel, that's when it feels wrong.

“Australia's obviously so far away from everywhere, but with our phones and with TikTok and Insta and whatever else we've got going on, Australia has never been more connected than it is now to the rest of the world. McDonald's is this big global brand helping people with that window out into the rest of the world. So of course we always want there to be local nuance and we want the work to really resonate with Australia, but if we really are doing our jobs, then it's work that can also resonate elsewhere.”

​Sticking sauce lids to the wall and ignoring the physical limits of out-of-home was the first W+K Sydney work to really do this, Matt said. “I know our American colleagues would openly say they're jealous of that. We want it to be that the big, established guys are like, 'Wow, okay, that was amazing, we wish we'd done that.'”

The largest-scale campaign to date starred the Grinch at Christmas. In addition to the hero film and social work, 50 restaurants turned the iconic Golden Arches green. “That is mad, right? That's amazing, that's us doing what we wanna do.”

The idea was rooted in a very Australian insight -- the Grinch would be “pissed” about the “double positive” of Christmas in summertime -- but is an idea “that the rest of the world can love and appreciate too.” A week after it launched,Leo enlisted the character for McDonald’s UK.​

And ‘Brekkie Comes First’ felt tongue-in-cheek, and true to the brand, “like McDonald's were having fun.”

“You can tell when a group of people are enjoying themselves. I don't think a group of people that weren't enjoying each other's [company] would have come up with that.”

The Instagram

The agency certainly knows how to have fun on Instagram. For the profile picture, it turned the logo upside down (the wink to Wiedens being down under is now the office’s official logo) and thought, given it was starting with zero followers, “why don’t we start a lonely hearts ad?” The style has recently shifted to a hand-drawn, black and white aesthetic.

Tinkering with the balance between consistent global messaging and a distinct Australian personality meant asking “what is our own voice?” and “how do we want to show up here?”

“Maybe let's not take ourselves too seriously and let's use our socials to have fun,” Matt said, because “you can see when a group of people are enjoying working together and enjoying making the work.

“Yes, it's gonna be hard at times, but it's also gonna be really fun at times, and if we can all enjoy each other and enjoy the experience, the work will speak for itself.

“If there's one thing we want to hold on to and maintain, it's that level of enjoyment and problem solving and getting put in a box and figuring out the greatest way to get out of it. You do that with a smile on your face and never really feel like it's a job.”

Ultimately, that’s Wieden+Kennedy Sydney’s pitch to prospective clients and colleagues. “It's about a group of people that care deeply about your business, trying to do their best possible work they can for you, and being really good humans while they're doing it. I don't think we can go far wrong if that's what we do.”