When we think of advertising, we tend to focus most on its less appealing qualities. But in the right hands, with the right guidance, could it become a force for good?

Kate Humphries remembers her first steps into advertising as much as an awakening as they were a career step. She’d finished university, worked and travelled for a few years, and then returned to London with a vague desire to get adult life underway. Something she wrote about tequila, of all things, in a magazine-writing course piqued her tutor’s interest and she was directed towards copywriting at London’s School of Communication Arts. She remembers not really even knowing what a “copywriter” was at the outset, but she soon learned – and discovered something about herself too.

“It was life-changing. I realised how ideas inspired me. And how competitive I was with those ideas, and how I would parent the idea and try to get my idea to the top of the pile. I had always been shy and unwilling to speak up but I became feral, almost. I was so passionate about it.”

It’s a passion she is now responsible for inspiring in others. In 2009, half a world away, and with a successful career in advertising spanning the intervening years, Humphries was recruited to Auckland’s Media Design School to head its Graduate Diploma of Creative Advertising, the one-year course popularly known as AdSchool. Advancing into metaphor, as she often does over the course of conversation, she likened her role to that of a conductor – exerting a touch of influence here, some mentorship there, or just facilitating a connection to the industry to which her students inexorably head. But the orchestra itself, pitched headlong into the 36-week course, isn’t just playing. “It’s a real oven that we put them in,” Humphries says.

That oven is heated by the international and local competitions that students enter almost as soon as they set foot in the door. When Humphries took control of the course, students were settled in with a month or so of creative exercises. But Humphries soon nixed that aspect of the course, instead asking students to work on an international competition – either the UK’s D&AD New Blood or New York’s One Show Competition – in just their second week of study.

“We throw them in the deep end because the competition is on a Northern Hemisphere timetable, so the briefs are out in October, and [our students] start in mid-February. We just say, “There you go, you’ve got three or four weeks to come up with an idea.” From the very outset, we’re recreating the environment of a creative department – with Humphries essentially functioning as the creative director – as you would find it in the real world, with students working in creative teams of art director and copywriter on every project.

It is that immersive simulation of real-world working life that Humphries credits with the course’s success. Everyone, no matter what the industry, Humphries notes, learns “so much” in their first year of work, and AdSchool merely duplicates that indispensable experience. It works. This year’s cohort, for example, managed to get 44 ideas recognised as finalists in the international AdStars competition. “When the results came through on the big screen in our studio, it was just a joyous moment. We were just looking at faces going, “I’ve got this, I’ve got that.” Your learning gets acknowledged outside the classroom by industry judges and you are benchmarking yourself against creatives across the world.”

It starts, Humphries says – just as it did for Humphries herself, years ago – when students “fall in love with ideas. They have to do that.” The interview process for acceptance into the programme – Humphries generally takes around 20 students each year – is mainly, she says, “me talking, saying, ‘We’re structured like this, we do this, here is some of the student work.’ And I look. If they are blown away by that work, that’s the process starting.” Often, she says, when potential students are confronted with what their forebears have achieved, they didn’t “even realise this was where advertising could go”.

“Advertising’,” she says, “is such a dirty word,” and people often equate it only with “that ghastly stuff that stalks you, yells at you and exclamation marks you”. At AdSchool it is much more than that. Take the second project students work on, which Humphries describes: “You have to think about a brand’s purpose… really understand how that brand sits in the mind… and then find a problem that needs solving – one that a community, a country, the world has – and then explore new or emerging technology. You end up with three areas which are seemingly so distant, then you have to cross-fertilise them to come up with a branded product or service that can help to solve that problem? It’s not an ad, it’s something useful.”

When 23-year-old Bella Rākete (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hinemutu, Ngāti Tautahi) and Sam Taunton-Clark, 25, came together for that project in 2021, the issue they decided on was the repatriation of taonga from institutions around the world, tackled with the innovative use of blockchain technology. Rākete, who during a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam worked on her passion “for creating work from an indigenous perspective and using mediums and platforms to our realities and the realities of te ao Māori” and saw in advertising a natural avenue to continue that work, says the idea was born from a desire for “tangata whenua [to] exercise tino rangatiratanga in both digital and physical spheres and have autonomy over their own narratives”.

NFTaonga was created, and – in an illustration of how the work undertaken at AdSchool can reverberate far beyond the walls of the classroom – the project was awarded over $200,000 from the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage’s Innovation Fund. Five people, including Humphries, Rākete and Taunton-Clark, are now working on the project, which Rākete wants to see grow into a self-sustaining not-for-profit. “We have big hopes for that. Last year we were able to create this idea, see it through, and now it’s starting to come alive.” For Humphries, the success of NFTaonga flows back into the programme. “I’m learning so much from the process, this year’s students are also learning from it, and they’re going to take that learning into industry with them”

Rākete and Taunton-Clark immediately formed a fruitful, award-winning partnership when they first came together for that project. Taunton-Clark, whose OE ski-instructing in Canada was cut short by the pandemic and who returned seeking a career to satisfy the creative impulse that had propelled her through an undergraduate graphic design degree, found in Rākete’s mind something that both challenged and reinforced her own. It points to a unique – and, for some, challenging – aspect of both AdSchool and of the industry at large: you work in pairs, and the result of your labour rests on what Humphries calls the “alchemy” of two brains working together.

Another award-winning idea Rākete and Taunton-Clark came up with – using Google reCAPTCHA tech to look for signs of breast cancer, instead of the ubiquitous street signs, to prove you are not a bot – was the result of a last-minute pivot, what Taunton-Clark calls “a little drink and a big think”, and the fast-firing collaboration of two minds. “Things just started to layer in our brain,” Rākete says, her answer notable for her use of the singular “brain”. “Then there was that beautiful parallel of looking for the signs. It just went from there.”

As has what Taunton-Clark describes as the “newly-wed creative couple” to which she belongs, both Rākete and Taunton-Clark now ensconced in the industry, as junior creatives at Special Group. Taunton-Clark remembers thinking on the evening of the end-of-year show when her classmates were already talking about the job offers they had received, “Is this normal? This is definitely not what happened after uni.” And for Humphries, it is another pair of critical, creative thinkers released into the world at large: “That is important because we live in an urgent world; we live in a world that needs people who have ideas.”