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Study Advertising and Design at the Creative Circus Georgia There's more to a great career in advertising or design than just creating great advertising and design. The best of the schools do a fine job of teaching young people to make great ads, to produce great design and brilliant images. But it's not enough. It's not enough because there is more to our business, more to our kids' futures, than just the awards shows and the relentlessly overused term "great work." There is the question of the rightness of what we do, the morality of it all. In short, there is the question of ethics. Popular opinion holds that ours is a business of questionable ethics and morality. Those of us who, as teachers, constantly replenish the supply of new people in our industry have an obligation to ensure that no one leaves our charge without having considered the questions of personal decency and morality which we could face any working day. I do not pretend to be able to teach a philosophical system to my students. I have no interest in exploring with them sanctimonious indictments of the foibles, real or illusory, of the advertising business. Heaven knows, I heap on my students my own scorn for the intellectual bankruptcy of trendy thinking or political correct- ness that drives more than a few of advertising's critics. My objective with my students, really, is simple. I want each one to realize that she or he will never have to sacrifice a personal sense of what is right to business pressures. From time to time, even so cheerful a school as The Creative Circus finds itself with cynics, smug in their world- weariness, who let me know that they will work on any product, any account, any cause as long as the pay packet is big enough. I am immediately moved to as~ such a hard-case student if he would sell his body to any buyer. Invariably, the student, his masculinity vaguely challenged, huffs that he most certainly would not. I ask, then, why he puts such a premium on his body- everyone has one of those- and so little value on his unique and priceless talent? I remind my students that they will be hired because of their talent-and that talent is 100 percent portable: If ever they are asked to do something or work on something that they find morally reprehensible, I tell them they can refuse. Most likely the employer will understand the objection and put some- one else on the assignment. And that will be that. If it doesn't go well and the employer says do it or you're fired, then so be it. Leave. The talent that got you hired to begin with will get you hired again. Our talent is our safeguard in advertising, our ethical lifeboat. We can never actually be forced into doing something to which we object morally. We can acquiesce or we can take a stand, but the decision is always in our own hands. When students leave school and enter the professional world, it is essential that they take with them a sense of the rightness of our art, the moral imperatives of our craft. Knowing one's moral compass is a skill as essential in our field as knowing great writing and brilliant art direction, flawless design or breathtaking photography. Author: Michael Jones-Kelley, Copywriting Department Head, The Creative Circus, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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