Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) has pledged to provide financial assistance to enable the winner of the Nigeria qualifying contest to attend the Cannes Academy also known as the Roger Hatchuel Academy in France. The programme will take place during the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June. The winner will receive $500 pocket money and will have all travel expenses taken care of courtesy of APCON. APCON has partnered with Roger Hatchuel Academy Nigeria for three consecutive years in the area of moderating the tests and selecting the winner and now it is going further to sponsor the winner to Cannes. It’s an indication of the Council’s unrivalled passion to promote creativity and equip Nigerian youths for international leadership of the industry.
Registration is presently going on for the Nigeria contest which will take place in Lagos between the 6th and 10th of April, 2010. It is open to students from ages 18 to 23 studying advertising, graphic arts, marketing, communications or other courses related to advertising. To register, qualified students should send their full name, date of birth, school, department and phone number to office@chiniproductions.com before March 24, 2010. The Roger Hatchuel Academy is a high profile one-week course in advertising. The programme is made up of seminars, screenings and workshops. It is anchored by some of the leading lights in international advertising. Participants are able to network with their peers from other countries. At the end of the programme, they receive a certificate that is of international value during a graduation ceremony. The programme is designed for students who intend to practise advertising on leaving school.
The Nigeria programme will include sessions where students are taught by senior practitioners from the advertising industry. The reason for this is to ensure that everybody benefits even if they don’t get selected to participate in France. After the short training programme, a test will be administered by the Advertising Practitioners’ Council of Nigeria, APCON, based on the programme content and general knowledge of advertising, to select the best student, who will represent Nigeria at the main Roger Hatchuel Academy in Cannes, France. There will also be consolation prizes for runners up and all participants will receive certificates of participation in Nigeria. In 2009, Opeyemi Adeniran, a student of Mass Communications Department, University of Lagos and Oluwaseyi Ogundoro, a student of the School of Journalism, Lagos State University participated in the Roger Hatchuel Academy in France.
Philip Thomas, Cannes Lions Festival CEO said, “The Academy is one of the Festival’s efforts to reach out to young people at the very beginning of their careers. There is nowhere, and nothing, to compare with the Cannes Lions as a learning experience for people starting out in advertising and communications. I hear it from young people every year: coming to Cannes changed my life”.
Part of the package for 2009 were tutorials by some of the top names in the industry, including Nick Law, chief creative officer, North America, of R/GA; Mary Lee Sjonell, executive creative director of Bongo; Alex Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Laura Jordan Bambach, co-founder of She Says and executive creative director LBi, Dean of the Academy was Rick Boyko, who is a director and professor at Brandcenter. Also present were Michael Conrad, formerly of Leo Burnett, who has also been a dean of the Academy and now president of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership and Academy tutor Clive Challis, head of the advertising course at Central Saint Martins in London. Clive Challis will also be providing the students with a full week of intense training this year.
