Bright young things: examining the pick of this year’s creative crop from Media Design School and AUT

The ideas have been dreamed up, the work has been displayed, the sucking up to creative leaders has been done, the leftover nibbles have presumably been wrapped up in napkins and taken home, and another bunch of advertising students have learned a few tricks to help them into gainful employment. Here are some of the highlights from AUT and Media Design School. 

Kate Humphries, course leader at Media Design School’s Adschool, says she had a hunch this was going to be a great class when they shot out of the starting gates at the beginning of the year with two teams making AKQA’s finalist cut for the Cannes Future Lions out of thousands of entries worldwide.

“They then went onto prove our hunch was right by winning both student categories at the Newspaper of the Year awards; gold, silver and bronze at the International Crowbar Awards; two finalist spots for the Axis Student Awards (winner announced next year); a place at the D&AD New Blood workshop in Sydney where they took out best execution, and last weekend we wound up a busy year by reducing a raucous room of 700 people to utter silence (and the MC to tears) for a powerful spot one of our teams came up with for the Les Mills Fight Night for CanTeen.” 

She says MDS had the largest number of teams out of all the end of year shows “and those teams are flying off the shelf at the moment with several teams receiving competing offers” from agencies.

She says the school has been really lucky this year in having “a spectacular line up of mentors, some sound industry panels and a number of industry people coming in to talk to the students”.

“So we’d like to send out a sincere thank you to all those people for every single, generous second of the time they gifted to the students.” 

Paul White, creative director/programme leader of the advertising creativity and communications course at AUT, says the end of year show was “one of the best we’ve had”.

“Ogilvy, FCB, DDB, Colenso BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, String Theory, RAPP, Barnes Catmur, WhybinTBWA, True, Young & Shand, Union Digital, Hunch, Film Construction, The Web Company and Tiny Axe came to see. Since the show 14 people have been scooped up: four are going to Colenso BBDO, two are at FCB, two are at Y&R, two at True. Plus two were hired this week by DDB, one hired by WhybinTBWA, one by NZ Tennis.” 

• If there are any agency folk with their eye on the future who missed out on seeing the students’ books, email Kate Humphries or Paul White. 
• Check out some of the best creative work from this year’s Award School class here.