Auckland Media Design School and 2013 Student Newspaper Ad competition winners Melanie Lynskey and Genriani Shabani to work for free

Two females who will definitely be working for free until the end of this year (and probably for peanuts for a while thereafter) are Melanie Lynskey and Gentiani Shabani, the two students from Auckland’s Media Design School who won the 2013 Student Newspaper Advertising Competition.

In their Farmer’s campaign for Father’s Day called Pay him back with love, the student creatives subversively used retail pricing to indicate the money Dad had spent over the years.

Two other student teams from Media design School also made the finalist list Renee Warner & Avaani Maan for “Dad’s barricade” and Valentina Kanani & Bronte Adshead For “it pays to be a dad”.

Two more students from Media Design School won the Topical Brief award. Avanii Mann and Sam Pascoe’s campaign for Rangitikei Free Range Eggs featured images of a chicken mascot tackling a streaker at a sports event. The accompanying caption informed readers that “Great things happen when chickens have room to move”.

Media Design School also nabbed the three runners up spots in the topical ad category, one of them by Melanie Lynskey – and no, it’s not THE Melanie Lynskey. The talented woman also recently won the top copy prize at The Crowbar International Student Awards in Singapore.

Says Kate Humphries, course leader: “A big thanks to Newsworks for running the competition the competition has been accelerating student learning for the past ten years now, and proof of that is the fact that 15 AdSchool grads featured as finalists and winners in last night’s main competition.”