For those of you who don’t know, the Co-Lab Youth Road Safety Challenge is an amazing opportunity allowing you to work in teams to create a real advertising campaign! Over the course of one and a half days, you’ll be participating in a workshop to design an advertising campaign about road safety. And the best part? If your team wins, you’ll be able to make the campaign and get paid $1500 each! Now obviously this isn’t about the money, but it sure is a nice bonus!
My experience at this challenge was nothing short of amazing! We started this experience with some inspiring talks from the lovely folk at Publicis, learnt about some startling road safety facts from the Australasia New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) and heard our advertising brief. We then got straight into the fun part – creating the campaign! Our day was broken up with various creative challenges to give our minds a break from the task at hand. We also had some mentors from Publicis help us to enhance our ideas and make them stronger. After lots of brainstorming and a few weirdly wonderful ideas later, it was finally time to pitch. It was interesting to see the variety of ideas presented all from the same brief. I struggled to choose a favourite, I have no idea how the judges will decide which one to go with! We ended our day by announcing the top three teams and headed back to our (now slightly less exciting) lives!
I’m unable to fully express how wonderful this experience was. From meeting new people and making new connections, to working with our mentors, having a taste of what the real world might be like and pitching our ideas – it was a wild and invaluable ride!
One of the biggest things this experience taught me is that there are no dumb ideas. Which is surprising considering some of the ideas my team and I started off with! We discovered about halfway through the first day that the idea we all loved and connected with wasn’t ideal and had to go back to the drawing board. This is where all those ‘bad’ ideas proved to be useful and helped us come up with the actual idea for our pitch.
I highly recommend signing up for experiences like this one, as it is a fun and engaging way of applying your knowledge from your degree to a real-world situation. My biggest piece of advice for participating in these events is to keep an open mind and say yes to everything. You never know who you’ll meet or how they might influence your creative process. You never know, you might have just sat next to your future boss or co-worker! Another slither of help – stay connected. No matter who you meet, if you have a conversation with them try and add them somewhere. Whether this is just LinkedIn or Facebook, it’s the easiest way to keep in contact and grow your network. You never know when this will come in handy!
