A creative lesson.
Last week I had the pleasure of visiting The School of Communication Arts (SCA) as a mentor to their students.
The SCA is a small school that is creating and shaping the next generation of advertising creatives.
And the school itself is a creative proposition.
Its course has been co-written by over 100 advertising practitioners in what may be the worlds first wiki-curriculum.
Many of the UK’s leading ad leaders are mentors with big names like John Hegarty and Rory Sutherland involved.
The students act like creatives in an ad agency, with everyone working in teams.
And they even brand their ‘agency’ every year (this year it’s Spank, last year it was Lovechild).
Visiting the SCA was a cool and vibrant experience.
The students spend their time working on a combination of fictional and real advertising briefs.
The work is totally focused on ‘real world’, and the teams ask the same questions that professional creatives would.
I.e. What is the strategy, is the idea strong enough, will the creative deliver on the aims etc.
The students are desperate to get top jobs in top agencies – and many hope to win some awards to help get them there.
It is a refreshing learning experience and the industry is supporting them through mentoring and placement schemes.
I asked Marc Lewis, the dean of the SCA, about how PR and advertising should work together as disciplines and what they are taught from this perspective.
He was animated by this question.
He explained that he is already teaching his students that the advertising and PR worlds are intrinsically linked.
He believes one of the ways good advertising campaigns can be judged is by asking whether the idea is PR-able.
He also believes practitioners have a responsibility to the next generation of talent.
He believes that the “creative communications industry will thrive when people and companies from within the industry come together and share the burden of responsibility for developing the next generation of talent”.
Marc wants more agencies to engage and to spend time with the students, share their experiences and even offer placements.
His belief is that the long term benefit to the industry will be huge; better trained talent, connected to people from all corners of creative communications, able to collaborate and able to think outside of a media plan.
I’ll be going back to the SCA to see how the students are getting on.
?You may want to think about visiting too…
@adamclyne
