City Tech students Dong and Moody helped design this winning campaign.
Brooklyn, NY — Five talented students from New York City College of Technology (City Tech) participated on teams that swept the top three honors in The One Club’s “Creative Boot Camp” competition, held recently at Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York (CUNY).
The camp, co-sponsored by the New York City advertising agency Deutsch Inc., drew 80 students from primarily CUNY colleges, 60 percent of whom are majoring in visual arts, graphic design or communication design, with the rest working for degrees in public relations or business. All of the City Tech participants were communication design majors.
Led by creative directors and designers from across the US, the One Club Creative Boot Camp is an intensive four-day workshop that introduces students to the art of creating advertising for a client from initial concept through the final pitch. The camp is a diversity initiative with the goal of recruiting creative students from multicultural backgrounds to consider advertising as a career.
The students were randomly assigned to 16 teams of five students each. The teams worked on a communications problem posed by Pencils of Promise (PoP), a nonprofit organization formed in 2008 to increase access to quality education by building schools in Laos, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Ghana. The students were asked create a fundraising campaign to shed light on the global education crisis and attract new members to the PoP movement.
City Tech students Wing Dong (left) and Richard Moody (right) were part of a team that took first place in The One Club’s advertising competition. They are shown with their professor, Douglas Davis.
The students worked on their entries into this competitive campaign non-stop for the four days. City Tech advertising design and graphic arts students Wing Dong and Richard Moody were on the team that finished first. They named their concept “Pass the Pencil” and one of their ads (shown) had the tagline “You never know where genius needs nurturing.”
In recognition of their achievement, they received student memberships to One Club, gift bags and interviews for a paid position to work on The One Show and Creative Week, which take place in New York City. The One Show is an annual international advertising award show held in May, during “Creative Week,” a celebration of creativity in advertising, design, digital media and all the arts that feed and touch those disciplines. Mr. Moody is now interning for Pencils of Promise.
City Tech students Desiree Camacho and Mohammad Chowdhury participated on the team that placed second. They created a book, “Patrons of Promise,” featuring blocked out words that could only be accessed when the book was purchased. It placed the buyer in the position of a child/adult who couldn’t read, which tied into PoP’s mission to build schools in countries where there’s a lack of access to education.
City Tech’s Keith Brown and his team took third place honors with their ads using the tagline “Decoding Our Future,” which used jumbled lettering to evoke a sense of confusion for the reader. Once unscrambled, the text made a statement about who the client was and its aims, and, more importantly, what the client hoped the reader would do.
As part of the second and third runner-up teams, the three City Tech students received one-year One Club Student memberships and gift bags.
This year marked the third out of the four years the competition has been held that a City Tech student was on the winning team. It is also the second year in a row that the College had students who placed on the first, second and third-place teams.
Other City Tech students who participated in the competition included Jean-Paul Brown, Jonathan Campoverde, Rafael Cespedes, Brayan Feliz, Kevin Freeman, Jacklyn Landers, Julio Li, Liudmila Morozova, Valerie Ordonez, Latimel Rodriguez, Jay Soo, Delmar Springer, Mavis Szeto, Guido Tamayo, Andrea Vargas, Hui Wang, Charles Warner and Danny Yu.
City Tech faculty member Douglas Davis (advertising design and graphic arts) was invited to give an overview of advertising and the creative process to the students on day one of the boot camp, just after the client (PoP) gave them the assignment.
One Club is a professional organization for advertising professionals that was founded in 1975 and is based in New York. It is the world’s foremost non-profit organization for the recognition and promotion of excellence in advertising and design in all its forms.
New York City College of Technology (City Tech) of The City University of New York (CUNY) is the largest public college of technology in New York State. Located at 300 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn, the College enrolls more than 16,000 students in 65 baccalaureate, associate and specialized certificate programs.