Young Creatives graduate with distinction

This year’s class of bright young creative stars from DM Creative School were recognised at a graduation party last week. The 14 aspiring Creatives came from a wide variety of backgrounds, some working in agencies or on the client-side hoping to get into the agency world, some fresh out of university, and one even studying for his HSC at the same time!

2011 Creative School students and Wunderman National Creative
Director, Matt Batten celebrating their hard work and great
achievements on Graduation Night held at Wunderman.

The quality of work was outstanding and this was acknowledged by the tutors who decided to present 3 Highly Commended awards as well as the usual Best Copywriter, Best Art Director and Best in Class. The chosen students were:

Josh, Patrick and Lewis will be joining the rest of the Australian direct marketing community at the ADMA Awards celebration evening on Nov 24, to be congratulated along with the other award winners on the night. In addition Josh was offered a paid internship with Wunderman – which he accepted!

Jodie Sangster, ADMA CEO - with our three Creative School winners:
Best Art Director: Patrick Allenby, Best in Class: Josh Parmenter,
Best Copywriter: Lewis Farrar, and Wunderman National
Creative Director, Matt Batten.

Reflecting on the course, all students agreed that it was hard work, with tutoring and workshop sessions twice a week plus homework, but worth the effort. “I learnt more in the 10 weeks of this course than in my 3 years in advertising” said Andreas Sarcullo, who already works as an agency creative. This is testament to the quality and skill of the tutors and guest speakers all of whom gave up their precious free time to ensure that this new generation could benefit from their huge collective experience.

During the course the students are immersed in the crafts of art direction and copywriting for 10 weeks, covering every communication channel – online and offline, broadcast and personalised – and learn to apply their new-found skills on a new campaign brief each week. The students invariably find the course gives them an edge when trying to find agency work, and helps them decide whether to follow a copywriting or art direction career path.

The graduation party was held at the Wunderman offices, and special mention should be made of Matt Batten,National Creative Director of Wunderman and Rebecca Masterton, Account Director at the agency, who between them devoted so much time to organising and delivering the course.

The course will run again from mid-2012 and the ADMA website will be updated with a new course outline early next year.