WTF a judge of what?????

Jesus that is just degrading to every other state....

Now you can all look forward to a couple of years of banging on doors trying to find someone who will give you a break. Most of you will give up. The rest will spend half your wages on your rent while trying to earn your stripes. And a few, just a few of you, will go on to 'make it' in the industry. Good luck!

It was so lovely to see Ray Black recognized.
He has done more for this industries talent pool that any other individual.

Fact: One of the judges likes puns.

Good to see positivity is alive and well in the anon muppet above. What's the problem? Valium bottle empty again? It's a bastard of an industry to get into, but that goes for any industry worth a shot. At least Award, for all its faults, provides something to get going with - a basic portfolio, an idea of your own talent or lack of, maybe a contact or two. No point getting down about it, just get on with it.

congratulations to all the grads.

but what happened to the 'independent judging' panel? half of them tutored award this year.

Lynchy, you seem to have two different sets of rules for people on this blog. It's okay for people to slag off Furby or whoever but you wouldn't publish the name of the judge from my previous post whose fondness of puns borders on the ridiculous.

Personally, I don't care if the guy likes puns. I just find it interesting that a pun junkie is helping run AWARD because the first rule in advertising is that you don't write puns.

Is it a problem that you've posted the NSW work before the Victorian books are due? They're due at 5pm today. Seems like a problem.

Well done Nathan! But no prizes for soming second...

onya danny

Change "cheaper" to "more affordable" on the IKEA one

Sorry - but worst wall ever!

That's not Richard Maddox. It's Barry hall

Seen all these ideas before.

But not from AWARD students. Well done!

well done adam. cheers.

Pens that last looks like.. pens that leak...

meh, wall was crap. new judging process left a lot of good students out.

I like pens that last.
But they are also pens that fucking leak!! And won't last.
It would never 'run' in the real world.

The newspaper is weak...
The pen idea is as bad as getting the runs...
ikea- it's pretty cheap...
VW needs a stronger, shorter tag...

Meh?!
I hope the other ads compared better than these...

4:19

That's an insult to Barry Hall..

How can a pen last if it leaks everywhere??

I tutored AWARD in Melbourne this year and the ideas I saw kicked ass on the ones posted on this blog. I hope they weren't the best ones out there.

Can I suggest more senior creative people teach.

http://www.awardonline.com/view_articles_summary.asp?pxa=ve&pxs=90

Pens that leak, same idea was done by a student in Melb.

Well done to all involved.

Where are last years students? Where are they now?
Over to mike Munro

RE: Youth Day.
I didn't get chance to comment on the appalling campaign showcased by BWM, I was too busy doing real ads. Some bright spark within the agency realised the irreparable damage it would have to an agency that was once held in high esteem for creativity /planning, and it was removed promptly by the looks of things. I was choked to see such SENIOR creatives within the advertising fraternity put their names to this crap. Names I once looked up to. I would suggest that those once great names in the Australian ad industry go back to AWARD school and learn about the power of Advertising, and If that's too hard, go back home and learn about respect for others, and manners.
Idiots.

Funny, the dudes that came top in my year are all working for shit places now.

The ones that came top 30 or even lower have to good careers. And that's only a few years ago.

CDs should be judging the students not seniors.

Lets just face facts, half these people will vanish without a trace, the others will be treated as slave labour to further the careers of CDs taking the credit for the work produced, its been going on for years and will continue to do so.

Good luck to all who tried, just get your heads down and work bloody hard, at least one day you might get to fuck the CDs that will fuck you now.

The judging this year was rorted with a few of the judges being busted for awarding their own students.

6:29

Things don't have to run in the real world. Look at Cannes.

AWARD school is a disgrace. I feel sorry for the young people who believe it's worthwhile in any way. The tutors are a bunch of hacks at best. You'd be better off doing a creative writing class at TAFE.

A sad indictment of the Australian advertising industry. At least we can rely on it to be tired, dull and uninteresting.

I'm in Melbourne and just finished Award School yesterday. I'm pretty amazed by some of these ads - I think our tutors would've been told us to start again had we presented them.

The guy with the leaking pen is wrong on so many levels. The tagline is wrong and it's a really negative image. Plus, there were at least three people in Melbourne with the same idea.

The newspaper one is lifted straight from a nightclub stunt called "Traffic Light Parties".

Meh

Fucking Hell.

It's like watching the Under-17 grand final and slagging the players off because they're not as good as the seniors.

I've been doing this caper six or seven years now with reasonable success at three different agencies.

Looking back now, my AWARD school book is an embarrassment even though around half my pieces were on the wall.

What's the point of nit-picking and slagging these guys off? Of course, their work is weak and full of holes compared to a seasoned pro.

What should we all be looking for?

Potential to learn and improve.

For all you know - cunts - the person behind the pen ad will be signing your retrenchment cheque as your boss one day (even though it's usually the finance guy / MD - I'm making a rhetorical point!).

G'day to Nathan Willdig, congrats on your VW idea. Interesting work.

One (minor) criticism: the copy, whilst technically fine, I don't think really does the VW brand justice.

You should talk to Toby Talbot from DDB Auckland (I think he's involved with AWARD supercraft).

Toby is a top bloke, a brilliant writer and would know more about the VW brand than most (it's with DDB Auckland) and works on it regularly. VW copy has this nice casual subtlety to it which I'm sure Toby would be able to elaborate on more.

Well done again and good luck.

This is great. Thank you for injecting my friday afternoon with humour.

When I saw the stuff that made the Sydney wall I thought WTF??

Then I looked over the book I just handed in here in Melbourne and realised I had nothing better.

Now I hate myself and want to die.

But at last I don't have a brief for this weekend, so I've got more time to be depressed.

12 one hour lectures. What standard do you expect?

Miami Ad school is a full time course for a year.
RMIT university (in Melbourne) is a 3 year full time course.

I think there aren't enough top AWARD winning creatives tutoring. There's too many guys a year or two out of Award school themselves. I've won a shit load of Awards and I taught a few years ago. It nearly killed me. I was there nearly every week past midnight. My work suffered. (Most commited creatives are working well into the night. Either in the office or at home.)

I've seen three students over the last 12 weeks. All three of them were lucky to get 2 or more pieces on the wall but I have to tell you it wasn't their best work. In some cases far from it! Some of the work up on the wall made me cringe but then I put it into perspective; Just like with all awards shows, it's subjective. The judge's experience in the industry matters. The amount of Award shows they've judged would also be beneficial as they would know the inner workings of judging on a larger scale.

If I were CD's I wouldn't pay any attention to top ten. I'd go top 30. Even then you may be missing a trick. I know of some students that were apparently brilliant but their (bad) tutors told them not to stick stuff in the book and that same work was up on the wall.

If I were the students, I would be going out there and begging for briefs (not jobs). Ring creatives you know of (but don't necessarily know) and ask them to be your mentor. Keep writing ads. DON'T STOP. I know if I have a month off, I feel like I've forgotten how to write an ad (I've been working as a 'somewhat talented' creative for over a decade). Again DON'T STOP.

Look, Award school isn't perfect and it never will be. You students have been given an opportunity that another 2000 have missed out on and that isn't to do award school, it's a foot in the door, it's the opportunity to meet professional writers and art directors. USE IT!

To all of you that worked your guts out congrats. DON'T STOP.

If you ask Leo Premutico what has made him so good he'll tell you... He just wanted it more... He worked harder than anybody else.

The guy who topped it isn't a genius... Far from it. Like Leo he would have just wanted it more. If you've graduated in the top 3, 10, or 30 congrats but don't think you're brilliant. You're a dime a dozen. No more special than anybody else in this industry.

Make no mistake 'kids'; Award school is only the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of a very thick mother fucking book.

Keep writing.

Can we spot encouraging these young people please?

I'm really sick of looking over my shoulder.

http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/hyundai_getz_brazil

Was it just me... or was this exact EXISTING ad on this years wall in Sydney? (slightly altered of course, outlining Australia instead of Brazil... and with a diff logo in the corner)

Sure, we (students) all came up with similar 'first thought' idea's for most briefs... but how the f*ck did it make it past all the judges? Did NONE of them recall seeing this existing material?

Dont get me wrong. AWARD School was bloody great. I learned shitloads, gained some real insight into the Syd adland... and was definitely well worth doing.

Only dissapointing thing: it seems if I was ever really hoping to get anything on the wall... I should have ignored the strong anti-pun emphasis from my tutors... and maybe even plagiarised some existing work from overseas.

It seems to have worked for others.

http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/hyundai_getz_brazil

11.29 I know EXACTLY what you mean.
I was a student too. My tutors were fantastic and told me to stay away from puns
but there was a lot of crap on the wall.. i feel ripped off.

There was a really bad ikea ad with an allen key as a less than symbol. Like c'mon! Thats not wall material and was the shittest idea!
I put a huge amount of work into it and dont feel like i got much out, except for my
$1700 worth of alcohol at the bar (until the tab ran out..)

the only thing learned doing AWARD school a year ago now is i have a good idea how long a sharpie pen will last before it runs out of ink and becomes slightly to blunt to draw clean lines, and how to rule consistently straight borders around a piece of A3 paper freehand.

stop your whining kids. the ones that do well are not necessarily the ones whose work was on the wall, or who came top 10. the ones who succeed are the people who constantly work at their book, do internships for little or no money and think beyond advertising.

11.29
Nobody 'in' the industry looks at ads of the world. It's full of 'award school' ideas. That's why nobody saw it. It's not a great ad mate. Yes there was some shit work on the wall. Get over it.

(All the whingers refer back to 6.44. It's not an easy industry to get into. Resilience is 90% of this business)

Better than the Telegraph ads!

If one thing AWARD School taught me almost 10 years ago kiddies, is to stop whining, stop blaming the opposition, stop blaming the referees, stop blaming the court and start focusing on my own game. I advise you do the same. Yes $1,700 seems a bit excessive. But if at least is going to show you that you're not for this game, consider it a good investment. Judging for the amount of whining in here, most of you aren't cut for the job. Cut your losses and go home.

Considering 90% of this blog is from posters whining (especially when it's an entry on awarded creative), I don't really think it's fair to say 'you aren't cut for the job' when young ones do the same. The wounds are still fresh, they'll get back on their horse soon enough. If anything, the lesson of picking yourself up from disappointment and striving to do better is probably a very good lesson for them to learn.

Asides from the top 5 or so, I really doubt there's much difference between the top 20 and the students that fell off the radar. It could just be a misjudgment on what they put in their book, someone else had the same ad, or the tutor just didn't like that particular person.

Grads, remember it's all subjective, a completely different panel could have yielded completely different results so as 6:44pm said, if you did well congratulations but do not rest on your laurels. And for those that technically didn't, work hard on your books. As long as you've learnt something from it you've got all the tools you need to win some (real) awards in future.

That said I don't agree with getting select tutors (not one from each agency) to judge this year. Biased much?

9.58 your a tosser.

STUDENTS

People will say whatever. Those who believe what people say probably won't succeed in this industry. You can't rely on anyone's opinion of what you're capable of but your own. That's not to say arrogance has a place in this industry - arrogance usually just covers up a complete lack of talent - it's just to say that only YOU know what you're really capable of. So don't waste your time thinking about what shouldn't have been on the wall, or whether you could have done better with different tutors, or how much you hate the talentless hack who did better than you; if that's all you can think about you have the wrong attitude to do well in advertising.

You've jumped a hurdle. Feel proud of that. You made it through AWARD School and AWARD School is the best training ground we have for advertising ideas in this country. Nothing is perfect. But you have already learned a lot. And the School is as good as the current industry allows it to be. So be happy that you've had exposure to the best training available in ideas at this point in time in the Australian ad industry. What you do with what you've learned so far is entirely up to you. And now the real work begins. NO ONE who has done well in this industry has sat back and felt sorry for themselves. It's the people with real self-belief, a positive attitude and a hunger to keep learning and improving that do well. People who believe in what they can achieve. Some came first, some made Supergroup, some made the Mentor Program, some graduated, some didn't, and some didn't do it at all. Whatever. Everyone has a different path. But you're totally in control of your own.

Well having done AWARD school twice, with a decade or so in between, I can confidentlally say AWARD school was great, but it had absolutely nothing to do with me finally getting into the industry. I look at AWARD School as a way of making a cold call on a CD a little less cold.

The most important thing I took from AWARD School wasn't craft, it was the fact that to crack the industry, you hav to keep on trying. And trying. And trying. Keep coming back, keep hassling, keep working on your book and keep knocking on doors. Being talented (unless you're truly brilliant) isn't enough, there's plenty of talented people, some just give up too soon.

Keep working, keep knocking on those doors and leap at every opportunity, no matter how small. One day, one CD will remember you, one recruiter will think to call you, one CD will mention you to another CD and that's when you've finally got your foot well and truly in the door.

As one recruiter said to me, once you're in, you're in, and even if you've only been in for a brief period of time, if you keep working it's a hell of a lot easier to land that next job than it was your first.

Whatever happened to some of the past winners? That Ben guy has completlly disapeared

To all the people whinging about the $1700 cost.

If you work hard, shut the fuck up and take advice when it's given, break up with your chick and work your ass off you'll be earning double what you paid for 12 weeks in one week.

In under 3 years.

I'm doing it now. Bottoms up boys.

http://www.awardonline.com/view_articles.asp?pxa=ve&pxs=90&id=483

bottoms up? yeah, that does reflect the advertising industry i guess.

Top 22 what a kick in the ass to the other 100, you have now said that there was atleast another 8 good students who deserved mentors WHAT A JOKE, judging jury was crap - tutors shouldn't judge. Very dissapointed in the wall our tutors chucked half that shit out. InstaDry paint - painting over a nice car - wtf???

Congrats to the winner/s. Awesome ideas, good luck to the top section for your future in the industry. To the other bitchy comments in this thread, try again next year! Losers.