The One School is a door.
My MacBook Air probably sees me as a deer in headlights.
I’m laying on my bed with heavy eyelids, trying to make sense of my first-ever advertising brief. My brain has melted into pink fizz.
I’m working on the creative part of the application for the One School, an advertising school of sorts for black creatives, created by Oriel Lyons and sponsored by the One Club for Creativity. The ask? Create a spec idea that convinces the next generation to vote during the 2020 election.
Minutes turn to hours. Hours turn into what feels like days.
By the time that I come up with this master idea, the sun is stretching its arms across a denim sky.
My grand idea? I want people to type in nonsense until they get a voice to vote. Once they do sign up, they can type regularly. Because their voice can be heard now.
Shaky? Yes.
Original? I hope so.
But, most importantly, was it good enough?
A few short weeks later, I learned that yes, it was.
Oriel, a Creative Director at Spotify, decided so and informed me and a select group of other black creatives that we got into the competitive program. Months later, fresh out of graduation, I can say that it has changed my life.
The One School is what actually doing something about diversity looks like. Advertising schools charge what most four-year-colleges do for two-year programs, leading many black and brown people to not even consider attending.
I myself, realized that I wanted to pursue advertising late in my college years. Upon seeing the hefty price tag, I opted to continue studying journalism and that decision paid off: I’ve worked for MTV News, BET, Pitchfork, Complex, Vulture, Highsnobiety, and a number of other platforms. I’ve turned in book proposals to literary agents, wrote 80% of a book for fun, and have even worked with Pusha-T as a digital strategist.
But behind this all was this sweet allure of advertising.
I would have swiped right on it if it were on Tinder.
I’m not really sure where exactly this appreciation came from. Perhaps an obsession with Super Bowl commercials?
None of my family even knew that careers in advertising exist. We’re from Virginia, down South country-folk with varying degrees of drawl in our voices.
By the time that I found out about the career field, it was too late, so I powered ahead in journalism.
Upon being laid off from MTV News because of a company merger that also saw 499 people lose their jobs lat April, I figured that I’d give advertising a shot — somehow, some way. Never mind that I could need school potentially. I read that journalists sometimes make the transition to advertising so I banked on having some experience having mental breakdowns in Google Docs being transferrable.
After a conversation with Felix Richter of Droga5, I was recommended to the One School program. An application later, I was a finalist and was both overjoyed and worried. What had I gotten myself into? Was I really a creative?
The program kicked off with a dual set of lectures: One from Ray Smiling, Creative Director at Translation LLC, and the other being Shannon Washington , the Executive Creator at R/GA. They talked to us on our terms, showing us advertising that mattered to us, and educated us on the importance of our perspective. We received our first briefs which would become weekly exercises to test the mettle of our creativity to show off how we could nurture the seeds that had already been planted.
That’s when reality hit. Each week, we’d come with what we thought were to be great ideas — only for Oriel to let us know where they could be better at. It was a welcome change for me because most of my creative career so far always involved these kinds of discussions through Google Docs and not face to face. In doing so, I started to understand how to become a better creative and how to think outside of the box.
Out of all of the briefs that we got, my favorite was developing an audio idea for Spotify. After following the procedure of a lesson explaining what this particular type of advertising (Audio) looks like, we watched a number of creative examples that pushed the bar forward. I went home thinking of how to bring RapCaviar off the Spotify platform and into the real world.
What followed was in intense period of creased brow thinking at home over the course of a week in which I resubscribed to Spotify and let RapCaviar play for hours on end. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that RapCaviar’s songs could become Christmas carols that get performed at the homes of unsuspecting subscribers to the playlist. With his trademark smirk and chuckle, Oriel found the idea “interesting” as he so often said and instructed me on a couple of ways to tighten the idea up.
That idea now lives in my portfolio and it is one of the ideas that I am the most proud of.
Through these discussions, lectures, and presentations every week, the One School became a seminar and celebration of the black mind and how it processes creativity. None of our ideas looked the same, and they looked light years different from how agencies often processed the same, or similar, briefs. It showed us the value of our perspective and only made stronger our wishes to get into the industry.
Our graduation was attended by nearly 300 people within the ad industry and, in addition to receiving free swag during the program, helped us to feel the gravity of the coming shift in the industry — towards a diverse and more inclusive creative atmosphere. Some of us have found jobs and others are in the processes of finalizing negotiations to begin their careers.
Even though we’re finished with the One School, the journey has just begun. The One School taught us just how important our minds are in an agency that’s in need of new perspectives. That it’s free is just icing on the cake because you’re literally saving tens and thousands of dollars by just attending. I know who I am as a creative now. I’ve taken the steps, through ordering and reading nearly every advertising book that you can think of, to better myself and continue opening doors for other black creatives — just as Oriel and the One Club for Creativity have done.
To the black creatives out there that want to learn more about their creativity, how to nurture it, and get an inkling of just how much that they can accomplish, apply to the One School today.
My name is Trey Alston, I am a Copywriter, and you can find my website/portfolio here.
