Advertising Age reported on The Academy, a “new” advertising school from Goodby Silverstein & Partners that feels deceptively like an old heat shield. While the story hyped the alleged attempt to create a breakthrough enterprise, a closer look shows the White advertising agency is regurgitating a standard diversity ploy: educate kids of color. Sorry, but fabricating a racial and ethnic pipeline is usually a pipe dream. The tuition-free angle probably translates to a tax break for GS&P. Not surprisingly, the guys behind The Academy appear to be White men—including a ≈20-year advertising school veteran. One guy described the other’s contributions to the scheme as “100 pounds of gasoline thrown on a match.” Um, somebody explain to the co-genius that gas isn’t measured in weight.
Oh, and students will be tutored in San Francisco versus Sweden.
Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ New Advertising School Aims to Fix Industry Problems
The Academy at GS&P is now accepting applications for the class of 2022
By Parker Herren
Zach Canfield, director of talent at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, has been visiting advertising programs for nearly a quarter of a century. For many years, his school visits were done in the company of other agency recruiters, but he’s noticed a shift recently. Now, not only are agencies reaching out directly to students, but in-house brand teams have joined the recruitment rush.
“There’s a lot more people and, frankly, there aren’t a lot more students at the schools,” Canfield said. “You could see that the well was drying up a little bit.”
That’s why, for the last two and a half years, he’s been developing The Academy at GS&P, a year-long, tuition-free, in-house school to train the next generation of marketers. Hosted at the GS&P headquarters in San Francisco, The Academy will train young people and marketing newcomers the basics of advertising, without the fluff.
“We’ve done an incredible amount of surveys and data and digging on people who graduated from school,” Canfield said. “Asking them what were the most important classes they took? What were the classes that weren’t a good use of their time? What do they wish they had learned more of in school? What were they not prepared for?”
On top of teaching copywriters how to write and designers how to use Adobe, the program is able to offer students access to GS&P’s roster of creatives and facilities. Students will have access to the agency’s motion animation group, musicians and editors, as well as classes taught by agency partners Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby, Margaret Johnson and a host of guests. Plus, Dan Balser has stepped in as the school’s director, after nearly two decades at the Creative Circus, a two-year ad school in Atlanta.
Canfield describes Balser’s contributions to the program as “100 pounds of gasoline thrown on a match.” In addition to a decade on the creative side at agencies like Ogilvy and Publicis, Balser has spent the past 18 years as a program director at the Creative Circus, mentoring nearly 2,000 marketers who have gone on to top-tier gigs at agencies like Droga5, TBWA\Chiat\Day, BBDO New York and GS&P.
“The opportunity here is an agency that’s committed to doing this in a way that allows us to meet the students where they are, meet the agency where they are and the industry where it is,” Balser said. “So, it’s an opportunity to redefine what a junior or student portfolio looks like, to really look towards the present and the future versus looking at the way things have always been done. It’s a thrilling opportunity to be able to do that.”
But the team isn’t just trying to build portfolios for a small cohort of future ad workers — it’s trying to repair a tear they see in the industry. As agencies and clients recognize the need to give voice to representation, marketing schools aren’t keeping up with the demands of the industry, according to Canfield. The Academy at GS&P is what he and Balser hope is the beginning of an abundance of accessible learning opportunities for creatives from other big agencies.
Balser recalled his days working for Fuji Film and described how not a single company meeting passed without mention of its rival, Kodak. He says the same mindset is present in advertising schools: competitive scorn for peers. Balser and Canfield want the opposite for their new wave of training.
“We want to change education. I want more schools like [The Academy] to happen. I think this is a model of what the future of advertising education should look like,” Balser said. “To me, honestly, this is the beginning of an evolution."
Canfield added that “the school is our little attempt at trying to help make the industry better.”
Applications for The Academy at GS&P are available now on the program’s website. The school will open its doors to its first class in February 2022.
1 comment:
The devil’s in the small details and the small print at the bottom of the Goodby Silverstein offer, isn’t it? Verbatim:
“If selected, you must reside within commuting distance of the San Francisco Bay area.”
Contrast that with the following:
https://www.car.org/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2021releases/haibyethnicity
“The affordability gap is especially stark in expensive counties like San Francisco, where a median-priced home of $1,650,000 was only affordable for 8 percent of Black households, 15 percent of Latinx households and 22 percent of Asian households compared to 35 percent of white households.”
In other words, only a tiny sliver of people can afford to participate in this “100% free” program that comes with the the cost of being able to afford to live within commuting distance of the office, and have the time and resources to commute, in one of the priciest cities in the United States and on the entire planet.
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