Portland 2016: Sportlandia Part 2

The view of Portland from the top of Wieden + Kennedy's office building

While my trip to Portland was focused on sports media, a few of the places we went to had less of a focus on sports but were still related to sports and sports media.

(Apologies for the lack of photos in this post. These were smaller places so there wasn't always something to photograph.)

Wieden + Kennedy

Wieden + Kennedy is an independent advertising agency. Nike is one of its biggest clients, which is one reason why the Portland office was a stop during the immersion trip.

The second I walked into W + K, I could tell this was no ordinary office building. It wasn’t just a corporate building where people came to everyday from 9-5 to work. Outstanding artwork greeted us right as we stepped in the door. The left wall was adorned with hundreds of portrait photographs, and the back wall listed a bunch of what appeared to be Greek names.

Portland 2016: Sportlandia Part 1

The  view of field and stadium at Providence Park, home of the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns, while standing on the actual field 

Immediately following the end of the spring academic semester, I joined 23 other University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students on a trip to Portland, Oregon for an industry immersion course. Basically, we went to Portland to learn more about the sports media industry in conjunction with the course we took during the second half of the semester.

I was in Portland for six full days and got to see a lot of interesting things and learned a lot from our immersion visits. We did quite a bit in a short period of time, so my blogs about my trip to Portland will be split into three: two about the actual sports media visits and one about what I did in my free time.

The blogs about the actual sports media visits will be called "Sportlandia," a play on Portland, the show Portlandia, and the hashtag and group name we used on social media. Part one of Sportlandia will focus on the more sports-focused visits.