When I’m not Creative Directing, I am the Director of a program called The Kennedys. The Kennedys is a creative incubator inside the walls of Wieden+Kennedy. It’s an intense six-month program where twelve creators from outside the world of advertising collaborate and learn to make the next generation of great advertising through a patented method called “making cool shit.”
It’s a program designed to find people of diverse backgrounds, skills, socioeconomic class, and cultural expertise who might not otherwise find themselves in creative careers. In short, it’s incredibly rewarding in a way that winning Gold at Cannes can’t be. At least not for me.
Aside from lectures, client briefs, industry trips, and masterclasses with experts, each Kennedy is required to make a side project that skirts the edges of what could be considered advertising. Among them were a Haiku-based messaging app called Haikumi (available now for Apple store and Android), a 360 music video for an indigenous artist, a non-binary Quineañera dress, a weed lifestyle brand for elderly folks called Old People Weed, and a fake parking meter that would turn parking tickets into things like plane and movie tickets that got confiscated by the city of Portland.
It’s a hard program to describe in words. But let me know if you want to talk about it.
Below is a video showcasing all of the Kennedys. For context, the application required them to answer five questions in any creative format they chose.
