COM​ ​Ad​ ​Students​ ​Win​ ​Prestigious​ ​3​ ​Percent​ ​Awards

Students recognized for creative ideas promoting diversity

Boston, MA, October 19, 2017 -- For the second year in a row three teams of Boston University College of Communication advertising students have won a trip to New York and a portfolio review at the highly regarded 3 Percent Conference, the advertising industry’s leading conference and association for promoting women in leadership and diversity in general.

The winning students prevailed in a national competition to design creative posters promoting the event’s 2017 theme “Beyond Gender.” The winning posters can be seen here.

Winning teams included undergraduate students Stephen Friedman ('18) and Katelyn Pilley ('18) for PR Nightmare; graduate students Handan Luo and Yijie Song ('18) and Nora Barnicle ('17) and Rosa Hargrove ('17) for Full House; and Yonglin Huang ('18) and Nitchmon Chinavong ('18) for “Diversity in Position.”

BU’s three teams lead all other winning universities, which also included students from the University of Texas at Austin, and the Creative Circus. Winning teams receive free attendance at the two-day conference, VIP seating and introductions at the event, a portfolio review, and $500.00 to cover travel expenses, courtesy of sponsor Adobe.

Friedman, who has won two years in a row, and Katelyn Pilley entered as part of Professor Edward Boches’s Portfolio class. The other winners reign from Professor Pegeen Ryan’s graduate Fundamentals of Creative class.

“This is an amazing opportunity for our students - they are thrilled, and so are we,” said Ryan. “It validates the creative skills they’ve developed while here and shows they can compete with the very best. It’s also a reminder that their ideas and creativity can do more than sell products, they can help change things for the better.”

The 3 Percent Conference was founded in 2012 with the mission of “changing the ratio” of men to women creative directors. The name was taken from the fact that as recently as 2012 only three percent of advertising creative directors were women.

Today the annual conference has become a movement and evolved to a theme summed up in the line Diversity = Creativity = Profitability, celebrating and advocating the value of diverse teams and thinking in the pursuit of world changing creative ideas.

Creative Works