Three upcoming creatives have won scholarships for Award School 2017, after winning The Communication Council’s pop-up Award School at the Semi Permanent design festival.
The event saw 16 creatives work on a live client brief that champions diversity. Whybin\TBWA and ANZ bank, Saatchi & Saatchi and Toyota and BMF and Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) signed up to be part of the project, providing a brief, mentoring the students and judging the winners.
The winners of the program were Dave Matthews, Anneliese Sullivan and Dominic Counahan, who will all be attending the highly-competitive Award School program next year.
MLA group marketing manager Andrew Howie, who judged the MLA brief, says he was looking for ideas that matched the brand’s corporate values around risk taking, and would generate a conversation beyond paid media.
“Australia is becoming more and more risk averse so a campaign that does demonstrate this garners a lot of attention,” Howie says.
“Thinking about how you create something that people want to talk about should be the starting point for all communications anyway. That’s what we’re supported to be doing, making people feel.”
The students made it to the workshop round of the competition after responding to a application brief. They then had to attend the workshop around the idea of creating a final ad, for the out of home (OOH) medium.
Whybin\TBWA Melbourne creative director Tara Ford, who worked with students on the ANZ brief, says while all of the finalists came into the workshop armed with great ideas, her role as a mentor was to help them work with the insights to build a campaign based on a “big idea”.
“I wanted them to think about how their idea could be seen as a campaign and how other elements of that campaign could work," Ford says.
"The first step was getting them to articulate what the insight was, what the idea was, and from that, trying to let them know that anything that campaigned out from that billboard had to fit with that idea. The person who won in the end had more of a platform and the client could see it going everywhere and that's what really pushed it."
The event was designed to champion diversity, not only by allowing three of Australia’s biggest brands to showcase the importance of it to their businesses, but by making advertising appeal to a more diverse demographic.
BMF ECD Cam Blackley who mentored students on the MLA brief, says the competition achieved its diversity aim by being part of Semi Permanent.
“By having it as part of Semi Permanent we're getting a broader spectrum of creative types thinking ‘sure, I’ll throw my hat into the ring’,” Blackley says.
“We need to be bringing people in from very diverse disciplines into the industry going forward because advertising is changing.”
Saatchi & Saatchi ECD Mike Spirkovski, who mentored students on the Toyota brief, agreed that having the competition surrounded by creativity from a range of different disciplines, mirrors the movement of the industry.
“As our business moves into innovation being very digitised and tech based, this space is the perfect breeding ground for creativity and young talent because it's connected to all the stuff they love,” he says.
“That's our business now - it’s diversified incredibly.”
He also added that this type of thinking or “natural integration” came through in the work the students presented.
“It’s a natural ability because their world is very digitised, and very social. They’re going to connect the dots their way," Spirkovski adds.
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