Close-Up: From a Hackney comp to Bartle Bogle Hegarty

the winning team of Xandria Carelse and Shaimaa Mohran describe the
experience of creating their anti-bullying campaign.

Working with the Ideas Foundation at Bartle Bogle Hegarty for the past
two weeks has been an amazing experience. It has changed our perception
of the working world and advertising, and has helped us start thinking
about what we want to do in our careers.

We did a lot of things and visited many places during the past two
weeks. We were presented with our brief - an anti-bullying campaign -
from the Learning Trust at Ogilvy. We then went to the research agency
Hall & Partners, where we did research workshops and learned about
qualitative research. This helped us work out how to do research for our
pitch. We ended up with a camcorder in BBH's foyer, interviewing the
unfortunates who agreed to talk to us about bullying.

We spent time at Zandra Rhodes' old house, which was converted into the
Fashion & Textiles Museum last year. We worked with an artist called
Patricio, who encouraged us to change our ways of thinking and look
around us in the urban environment to find alternative ways of
advertising.

Our time was incredibly well spent at BBH; we worked extremely hard and
it paid off.

We were helped by our mentors to schedule our time and work out all the
things we needed to do in order to present our pitch. The BBH employees
were very enthusiastic about competing against other agencies, which
propelled us to work harder than perhaps other teams did: asking our
teachers at school to help us print the T-shirts we wore to the
presentation; staying at the BBH offices until 7.30pm and cutting down
our lunch breaks to make sure we completed all our work to a polished
standard.

The whole project has pushed us to think in different ways about work
and the future. We learned important things such as time management,
punctuality, how to present a good pitch and working to a deadline. And
then there was other stuff we didn't think we'd come away with: such as
how to present with confidence even when you don't feel confident.

It was scary presenting our pitch at the Rich Mix cinema - we were
competing against our friends and schoolmates in front of an audience
made up of very important people. We had to do it properly and very
seriously, because bullying is a serious issue.

When it was over, it was a big relief for all of us, not because the
project had been hard, but because we could stop being against one
another and all be friendly again. Winning gave us a great feeling that
maybe things do pay off if you have worked hard for them.