Kate Humphries’ 2024 Year in Review: “In a year that was harder than most, a big shout-out to the industry for all your support”

Kate Humphries, programme leader of Media Design School’s AdSchool reflects on the year’s highlights and extends heartfelt gratitude to the industry champions who helped make it all possible.

In a year of constrained budgets, hiring freezes, and more work on top of work, the industry still found time to support the creative advertising students at Media Design School. And for all those who found that time, you each deserve an outstanding achievement award, but failing that please feel free to contort yourself right now into an uncomfortable position so you can humbly pat yourselves on the back.

For AdSchool it was a year that started with a D&AD New Blood Wood Pencil Award, a D&AD Yellow Pencil Award, and a New Blood Top Portfolio Pick; a One Show Merit Award; the People’s Choice Award at The Webby Awards in the Advertising & PR Student category; and a hat-trick of awards at the Axis Awards with The Student Axis Award, The Axis Emerging Talent Award, and an Outstanding Achievement Award that represented 15+ years of award-winning alumni success in the industry.

It was a year that ended by defying all the well-meant warnings, that it was going to be the hardest one yet for students seeking to break into the industry, with 78% of this year’s MDS students not only being offered a place in an agency but also receiving more than one offer from agencies here and overseas (including both Australia and Canada).

And in between there were: a range of Industry talks from the incredibly generous one from Droga5 CCO Damon Stapleton, in which he gave away a copy of his Keep Shooting until You See the F*ckers Smoke book to each student, right through to the insanely useful session from MDS alumni, Tim Gavriel and Arron Carbines from FCB; Feedback and workshop sessions on work-in-progress-entries into global competitions as well as a mid-year industry panel that rather presciently featured a female dominant creative panel with one solo male creative; a one-week TikTok workshop delivered by creative agency partner, Nick O’Donnell and Smaran Jworchan, which ended with two of our teams presenting their ideas for NZ Tourism to ECD Kat Jarrett from TBWA Sydney; an incredibly slammed Sam Stuchbury & Melina Fiolitakis from Motion Sickness donating their time to come in to brief the students and a week later returning once again in person to listen and give feedback on all the students’ ideas; a final industry panel which saw 8 panellists spend an average of two to three hours marking all the portfolios; the MDS invite in which 23 good sports read out mean comments about their work, and an End of Year Portfolio show which saw a huge turn-out of agency creatives at the Classic Comedy Club.

Defying the odds again, we also had the most successful and quickest recruitment of mentors ever this year, to which we owe a grateful thank you both to the Comms Council and to the industry ghostwriter of our Live-Forever shout-out email which began with the immortal words “You’re long dead, or suspended in fluid, and a young person somewhere is sagely repeating some advice you gave another young person back in 2024”. A ghostwriter because she didn’t want me to mention her name. So, staying true to my word, I promise you I won’t, Sylvia. To all those mentors, you are far too numerous to mention here, but this year especially, we owe you a huge debt because the impact you made was enormous.

We also owe a grateful thank-you to The Radio Bureau for organising and sponsoring the Student ORCA Awards (Fleur Herscott you deserve a medal); and to Simon Lendrum and the Comms Council for organising the Student Axis Awards. A well-deserved shout-out also to Vanessa Mihaljevich, Jonathan Mihaljevich, and audio engineer Cole Goodley from Franklin Rd Music And Sound Effects for donating their space, time and talent to allow us to get the grand finalists’ radio campaigns for the Talk Peach and Bellyful clients recorded. Thank you also to the two industry judging panels for the Student ORCAs: Matt Williams (DDB); Hadleigh Sinclair & Simon Vicars (Colenso BBDO) and Emily Beautrais (Clemenger BBDO). And to the six students who made it to the final three grand finalist places, a big congrats to Emily Boswell, Romy Lane & Mikayla Riddell for ‘Too Much on Your Plate’ for Bellyful, and to Stasia Edmeades, Sonya Solonchenko & Khushaal Singh for with ‘Ghosting’ for Talk Peach.

A big round of applause also to the Student Axis Judges: Arnya Karaitiana (Special), Dan Wright (Deloitte Digital), Angelo An & Alan Jones (FCB), and Tom Paine (Pitchblack). Thank you for doing two exhaustive rounds of judging. As for the students, congratulations to Willow Whitman & Zack Ridell for Kinsultants and to Dragon Chen & Faith Waraki for Takahi Power, for making it through to the final shortlist of the three grand finalists going through to Axis Executive Judging ahead of the Axis Awards early next year.

A standing ovation to Haydn Kerr and Simone Paterson for again organising and hosting a morning session this year at DDB Aotearoa for students from AUT and MDS. To hear Haydn Kerr, Matty Burton, Nikki McKelvie, Sarah Shepherd and Kimberley Scott take the time to speak to the students was a personal gift to every one of those students. They also loved hearing previous grads who had sat in their place two years ago speaking of what a day in their lives now entails. As for the Weird is Wanted theme of the morning, I was so impressed with it, that I’m weirdly stealing Dan Fastnedge’s photo of that slide here (because dammit I swear that man stood right in front of me when I took my own photo of said slide):

More grateful cheerleading to Haydn Kerr, Matty Burton and Gary Steele for following up Weird is Wanted with their creative development internship program ‘Ride the Lightning’ again this year. The first year they DDB run the program, three teams were selected from MDS, and those three teams were hired. Last year despite being liberally laden with juniors they hired another MDS creative student. This year DDB again selected three teams from MDS,  one had already accepted an offer from another agency, so they graciously declined (consider that spot payment for the purloined photo Dan). But a whopping-big-hearty-congratulations to the other two MDS teams on the Ride the Lightning internship: Freddie Von Trott  & Sophie Douglas (aka Doug)  and congratulations (again) to  Faith Waraki & Dragon Chen.

Thank you a thousandfold to Greg Wylie, Smeta-Chhotu-Patel and Lorenz Perry we couldn’t have done it without you this year. And to Andy Blood, as always your input was inestimable.

And to Faith Waraki, as the first-ever recipient of the Ngati Whatua Scholarship this year, I am ending this wrap-up of 2024 by saying MDS could not be prouder of you right now. Both for being selected for DDB Aotearoa’s Ride the Lightning Program and, most of all, for making it through to Axis Executive Judging of the Student Axis with Takahi Power, in a year in which the raw power of the Haka was realised all around the world thanks to the powerful voice of a wahine.

He Kirihimete hari me te tau hou ki te katoa.