3. IF YOU BUILD IT
While some agencies are stepping into the classroom, Portland’s Wieden + Kennedy has built its own—a 13-month program called “12,” named for the number of students who attended the school, held on the premises of the agency the first year. Jelly Helm, the school’s director, teaches without rote curricular method, in keeping with the mission to create an experimental lab. “The way we teach students how to write a brief,” says Helm, “is we ask them to write a brief. And then we look at it. We’re not trying to come up with ideas on roller coasters or anything stupid like that, but we wanted to see what would happen if we approached the work without any ideas about what was right.”

Participants work as a collective, crediting their work under the name 12, rather than as individual art directors or writers. In developing a philosophy for the school, Helm studied some of the most innovative educational models in the world, including The Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and the KaosPilots design program in Sweden, both of which grant students freedom and responsibility in equal measure. His message to each student is that his or her job is to make the other students better creatives. “And if that sounds commie,” he says, “the good thing about it is there are 11 other people trying to make you better.”

To be sure, a collaborative ethos along these lines is an anomaly in ad agencies, but 12 is more an agency than a school. As Helm says, “We have real clients who forget we’re a school about 10 minutes into the relationship.” Students have produced a brand campaign for The City of Portland, a get-out-the-vote campaign for The National Voice, and campaigns for software company Grokker and the sustainability advocacy group Ecotrust, among others.

Helm speaks with genuine bemusement of the industry skepticism the school faced upon its launch. “People assumed that this was a way to get people to work for the agency for free.” However, he notes that students of 12 don’t work on W+K clients but their own, and that, moreover, the first-year tuition doesn’t fully cover the costs of running a hybrid school/agency, with the instructors and materials necessary for both.

At 12, students have the opportunity to exert more creative control over their work than they’d likely get anywhere at this early stage of their careers. “They’re essentially given their own agency,” says Helm, “and they can make of it what they want.” The experiment has also energized W+K, according to Helm. “12 knocks us on our heels,” he says. “We don’t always know what the outcome will be. Having that chaos in the agency is an essential part of creativity—having something unknown in your midst.”

4. A REVOLUTIONARY DRIVE
Creativity is about as teachable a thing as good eyesight, and some are quick to point this out. But the contention is besides the point, as that’s not what students are after. And it’s not what they need. “You can’t put what isn’t there there,” Vick Bynum says, “but you can teach students how to translate their creativity to paper in the language of the business. Our students want to work in the field, and that’s what we help them do.”

Osaki puts the work of educators in revolutionary terms, and his point might well serve as a manifesto for advertising education in general. “I’ve always felt advertising is revolutionary rather than evolutionary,” he says, “and it’s always seemed to me that the drive to be a part of that revolution is an impetus to study advertising. If we don’t recognize that as an educational institution, then we’re not doing our job.”