The second year of the Grade 12 Creative Advertising (St. Marguerite d’Youville Secondary School, Brampton, ON) came to a very successful close on Wednesday June 10 with an advertising campaign presentation to a client, the Planet In Focus Film Festival. The presentation was at the end of three weeks of hard work, many of the students coming into the school on both Saturday and Sunday on the weekend before.

Planet in Focus runs an environmentally focused film festival each October  in Toronto, Myan Marcen-Gaudaur the Marketing and Outreach Officer from Planet in Focus was thrilled with the work of the Creative Advertising class. In her words “I was truly bowled over by what I saw yesterday – the astuteness, creativity and professionalism displayed by these young people was very impressive.”

In addition to Ms Marcen-Gaudaur, the presentations were received by Anthony Kalamut, the Chair and Professor from the Creative Advertising Program at Seneca College. The students received valuable feedback on their campaigns that included print ads, videos and viral marketing. Mr Kalamut has been involved with the program over the last two years, some of our students have moved Creative Advertising at d’Youville to his program at Seneca while others have gone into the Humber degree program and OCAD.  The program has also fed into areas of graphic design, journalism, film, radio & television as well as business studies.

In April this year Ms. Prior the founder of the program and Mr. Fujiwara made a presentation to the Ontario Business Educators Association conference. A number of teachers across the province are interested in what is happening at d’Youville and are anxious to look at offering the same program in their schools. Ms Prior has been asked to visit a school near Barrie to help start a program.

The Creative Advertising course offers a University level curriculum that challenges students in a different way.  As teachers we so often ask our students to be creative but don’t always teach them ‘how’ to be creative.  It is too often associated with the arts, drama, painting, music and dance.  Although these fields require creativity they are the ‘arts’.  Creativity, like critical and strategic thinking holds a strong place in business and other traditional left brain subjects.  If we don’t start having our students learn to solve problems in a creative way we will fall behind in the global market.  Creative Advertising concentrates on re-conditioning how they think and gives them the tools to think different.  After all as a if we all think the same, someone isn’t thinking!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 2:50 am and is filed under Creative Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.