Melbourne’s Richie Meldrum recalls AWARD School experience before Thursday’s graduation

Melbourne student Richie Meldrum recalls the highs and lows of his AWARD School experience in a CB Exclusive – Right now, there are forty-odd wannabe advertising creatives who are sweating it big time. I know – I’m one of them.

Graduation has once again arrived at AWARD School, the creative advertising course that acts as as a springboard for the careers of some of the biggest and brightest names in the industry.

Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania have already had theirs, tonight (Thursday) it’s Melbourne’s turn. This evening, the class of 2012 will turn up to see if their efforts will get them the result they’re after – whatever that may be.

Founded by industry leader Ray Black and managed by the Communications Council, AWARD School is a mix of advertising theory and practice designed to raise creative standards in all forms of commercial communication.

Over 16 weeks, with a much-needed 3-week study break/breather in the middle of it, students receive one lecture and one tutorial session per week. At each lecture, industry working creatives from the top agencies in the country present on a selection of different topics. Some of them come with lovingly-prepared slides and strong lesson structures, others wing it and just show stuff they think is cool.

Rregardless, all of it is soaked up and scribbled down by the keen young things sitting in front of them. At each of the tutorial groups you are set a gloriously simple brief, one which you are regularly assured by those in the know that you will never see the likes of again should you actually get a job in advertising where briefs come laden with various mandatories and complications.

“They are usually a simplified version of a brief that you might get in an agency.” says the Communication Council’s Linda Anderson. “Normally the first couple of briefs the students receive are fairly straight forward and they become increasingly difficult as the course progresses.”

You must come up with numerous solutions to answer the brief and present them to be critiqued by your tutors the following week. Your AWARD School folio, which consists of one solution for each week, is then presented at the end of the course for judging.

AWARD School has been operating along these lines for almost 30 years and continues to be a highly regarded, well-trodden passage into the advertising industry for those that do well.

But how does the course continue to be such a successful entry point into the industry?

Draft FCB’s Jay Hynes, who runs the Melbourne show together with David Ponce de Leon from BD Network says: “Everyone says this but it’s true – it’s because it’s all about ideas.  Essentially, AWARD School doesn’t have to change as long as it remains about ideas.”

This notion is continually hammered home to students throughout the 16 weeks – ideas, and the creative thinking needed to come up with good ones, are key curriculum criteria.

Topics have evolved along with industry growth and changes, however, the key focus of the programme remains. “It’s a course about ideas, creative thinking and the processes,” confirms Anderson.

While courses in other industry sectors are often structured to convey the realistic expectations and environments of the workplace, AWARD School is almost completely the opposite. It is a place where you don’t have to consider tricky clients, stubborn brand managers or any of the other realities that are part and parcel of being on the job.

If ever there was an advertising utopia then AWARD School surely must be it. Of course, it’s incredibly hard work and an immensely taxing experience for those who take it seriously.

Working on each brief is a task that never leaves you – day or night, lifestyles have to be changed, sacrifices have to be made, partners and girlfriends occasionally get pissed off.

However, away from the hierarchies, politics and distractions of the real world, AWARD school is able to remain focused on one thing and one thing alone  – the creation of killer ideas. This is a good thing.

Students in Melbourne this year were treated to some wonderfully insightful and entertaining presentations. Lecturers somehow managed to pull off the brain-aching task of successfully teaching the actual process behind coming up with good ideas – each preceded with their own “this is just how I do it” disclaimer.

McCann Executive Creative Director John Mescall extoled the virtues of combining what you know about a brand with what you know about the world in order to reach an idea that is inherently interesting and thought provoking.

Speaking on radio, M&C Saatchi’s Doogie Chapman urged the class to look at the medium as a ‘theatre of the mind’, to know your target audience and to let the idea do the writing.

Chris Northam from GPY&R Melbourne introduced the remarkably effective ’50 blank boxes’ method while Rob Beamish from JWT urged students to go beyond the walls of advertising and look to art, design and film for creative inspiration.

Finally, Clemenger BBDO’s Ben Keenan offered a number of scroll- worthy insights on digital ideas, suggesting students use technology simply, rather than simply use technology. His presentation featured various examples of digital ideas he rated including Skittles’ ‘Touch the Rainbow’ YouTube man-cat, a Twitter facilitated parking space finder from Mercedes Benz in Berlin and the infamous ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ campaign from Burger King in the US.

Wonderful, fascinating, inspiring – the award school lectures were all and more. The tutor groups, however, were often not such an enjoyable experience. Not surprisingly, for a course aimed at aspiring creative taking their first steps into the field, the work produced is of varying quality.

Presenting ideas to tutors is often quickly followed by watching each one of your week’s efforts ending up in the “yeah…nah” pile – confirming your fears that you actually clearly suck at this advertising stuff.

But, this is a learned craft and it is the task of the various tutors to shape and mold these young creative minds so that they can start to learn when an idea is really shit, (“yeah…nah”) when it’s just not any good (“I think you’ve got better stuff”) or, occasionally, when there actually might be something in it (“work on that”).

Enlisting working creatives and creative teams to tutor the course is one of its main strengths according to Hynes. “I believe that the willingness of creatives to give their time to lecturing and tutoring is a massive part of why AWARD School is so important to students. As creatives, we are very competitive, but in my time that competitiveness ceases when it comes to helping/mentoring students.”

Finally, after 4 months, numerous notepads, countless spent pens and hours and hours of staring at a blank page trying to remember what it was John Mescall said about the truth of a product – it’s over. Your folio is handed in and the dreaded judging commences.

“We normally have 8 judges that each get to judge around 2/3rds of the folios each,” explains Hynes. “The folios with the most dots on them are collated into a top ten. From there it’s very involved with each of the judges going through each folio individually to determine the winner.”

Which brings us full circle. Walking into AWARD School I had little idea o
f what to expect. Refreshingly, the course is full of people coming to this from a number of different avenues and for a whole range of different reasons. There are the dedicated ad kids who are desperately seeking that first junior role, writers, filmmakers and illustrators who want to flex their creative talents in another industry, and lawyers, IT managers and accountants keen to use the other side of their brain for a change.

Some of these people dropped out after the first 6 weeks. Many will go back to their old jobs and never think about a white box again. A couple may go on to achieve something amazing and perhaps some of them might even score a gig in the ad industry.

But a lot of that won’t become clear until tonight (Thursday night). So until then, we’ll all have to sweat it out just that little bit longer.

Richie Meldrum is a writer, journalist and creative director at Yoke.

Visit Richie Meldrum’s website here or contact him via his email address here.

@richiemel