From September 18 - 22, Minds Wide Open will be back for its third year. The event is an opportunity for students to learn how to solve problems in advertising and establish partnerships and friendships that span the globe.
The week-long competition will group together about 50 international and 30 advertising students into teams of 6-8 to create advertising campaigns. Each of these teams will be assigned two mentors from a group of highly-regarded creative directors from some of the top advertising agencies worldwide. This year’s mentors come not only from Michigan State University, but from as far as Beijing, Madrid, Munich, South Africa and more.
Two of the mentors are recent Department of Advertising + PR graduates. Andi Tonis now works at McGarryBowen in Chicago and Lukas Miller, who works at Deutsch, will be flying in from Los Angeles.
Hoobie, a Boston social media start-up, will be this year’s Minds Wide Open client.
All of the teams will be assigned the Hoobie brief, which will explain the client’s goals and problems that they want the students to tackle creatively. With their mentors’ guidance and the help of a translator, the teams will spend four days developing and executing ideas for a campaign that addresses the brief.
On the fifth and final day, each group will have 20 minutes to present their campaign. The client, mentors and guest professionals from the community will vote for the winning campaign, which will be awarded later in that evening.
Advertising + PR professor of practice Henry Brimmer is excited to reunite with old friends and welcome new faces. Previous team mentors Albert Lin and Philipp Cerny will be returning to Minds Wide Open, as will some of the students from last year.
“I’m excited about having the Chinese students participate again,” said Brimmer. “We must be doing something right; Hong Kong Design Institute and Shanghai Normal University have participated in the previous two and are back again.”
In the past, Minds Wide Open was primarily attended by Chinese and MSU students, but this year the event is much broader. Brimmer is also excited about the students participating from Mexico, Germany, Spain and South Africa.
By Kaitlin Dudlets