Editorial copy from next weeks creativity:
“VCU, One of the most esteemed educational institutions connected to this business of ours, a school charged with grooming the next generation of creative marketing torch bearers, is no longer an Adcenter. School steward and MD Rick Boyko recently announced the school would now go by the handle VCU Brandcenter. (see p. 6)
Aside form provoking relief that the school’s deciders didn’t go with something more oblique and annoying (or something with “Idea” in it) the name change seems apt. Boyko has spent his tenure at VCU retooling the center’s program to mint minds for the new era, expanding the scope of the school’s teachings with the goal of creating graduates that aren’t merely carriers of attractive portfolios and makers of attractive ads but creative thinkers and marketing problem solvers. In addition of a Masters in Creative Brand Management in 2005, to help spawn a new breed of creatively enlightened marketer and account person, and last year, the Advanced Management Training program for creative directors.
So if the Adcenter isn’t an ad center anymore, is the industry into which its students will graduate still an ad industry? Are you people still ad men and women? The head of our agency of the year David Droga called himself “absolutely an advertising man” in our last issue and yet we recognized his agency’s work in part for its non-advertisingness. Is the distinction important? We’ve talked at length in Creativity about name calling–if it’s not advertising then what? –as have others. TBWA’s Lee Clow has famously pursued a vision of a “media arts company” as the evolution of an ad agency and has told us in the past: “Brands today cannot be sustained by what in the past has been called advertising…everything a brand does that connects to the consumer is media, is brand communication. If orchestrating the art of all those media conversations isn’t advertising, then perhaps the creativity of what we’ll do in the future needs a new name.”
-Teressa Iezzi, Editor – Creativity
Its great to be at the Brandcenter in 08′. Pictures of the new space to come soon …
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