A creative think tank from Wieden + Kennedy is hiring…get on the Platform. Woot woot! Chugga chugga.

Ad giants/providers of free Heineken and Starbucks Wieden + Kennedy are calling for creatives who are not Mad Men (sartorial 1 ad types) to join a think tank called Platform. Basically, you get 250 pounds per week (it’s London based) for 6 months to pull heads together with other fun people all over the world, working with clients, honing existing skills and digging out new ones, and exploring the outer reaches of creativity.

The application has two parts: First, pick something in the world that bugs you, and make it better. Film or photograph the process and upload the photos to your Flickr 2. Second, create a 3 minute or less video that covers these questions: Who are you? What inspires you? What is your obsession in life? What is your greatest regret? What is your guilty pleasure? Upload the video to YouTube.

Applications are due weekend after next, July 10th (this deadline was extended from earlier). Remote work from another office is ok, so you can hang out on the roof of their awesome Portland building and bug Ava in the W+K radio station and Kirsten down at Literary Arts and everyone at PICA. It’s a regular beehive 3.

A search of Flickr and YouTube for combinations of “Wieden and Kennedy platform,” to check out the submissions, gave nil results. There’s lots of W+K produced videos on YouTube, though, including this, which is the top result for the above search (skip in about a minute):

I learned about Platform from Creativity Online, which gathers interesting print and web work into daily digests. Subscribe, it never fails to inspire.

Footnotes (I’m reading Infinite Jest):
1.) Sartorial=tailored=well dressed. Etymology, as given to me by a New Seasons Market checker last night: Tailors used to do their work by loosely crossing one leg over the other, to create a flat area. The sartorius thigh muscle makes this possible, and would get a little bent out of shape, causing them to walk funny, and they became known as sartorialists. Events like the Academy Awards are often called sartorial events, because everyone is wearing snazzy outfits. You can also use it to describe and compliment someone: Looking sartorial today, good sir! Then there’s the street fashion blog The Sartorialist, which was all I had to contribute to that conversation.
2.) This is a really crappy week for my camera to be broken due to a squirt gun accident while riding a bike dressed as a cowgirl for Pedalpalooza. Thank heavens it worked for David Byrne.
3.) Ava works at the radio station in the Portland W+K radio office, where I had hoped to do a 10 minute segment on the cradle to cradle story of everyday items. How plastic bags are made turned out to be very interesting. But my work got ahead of me, and now they’ve taken the radio off the air to regroup and reform the content. That’s what I get for being a slowpoke.

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One Response to “A creative think tank from Wieden + Kennedy is hiring…get on the Platform. Woot woot! Chugga chugga.”

  1. kirsten says:

    “No you don’t need to have worked in a creative agency or even worked before.”

    That’s the spirit! Are you going to apply?

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