The Tomorrow Awards are dedicated to guiding our industry towards its future. We firmly believe that such a mission starts by investing in the next generation of talent. The up and comers and the people who aren’t even part of the advertising industry yet, but who will end up creating and shaping its future.

Another thing we firmly believe in is putting our money where our mouth is. That’s why 10% of each entry fee will be allocated to the Tomorrow Awards Scholarship Fund. In our inaugural year, we have selected two prestigious schools to share these monies: Hyper Island and VCU Brandcenter.

Every year, Karlskrona and Stockholm, Sweden’s Hyper Island produces some of the most sought-after digital talent in the world. The school and its courses are designed to mirror working life as closely as possible. The school is open 24 hours a day, the interior is designed like an agency (there are no classrooms) and work starts at 9 am each day, with a minimum 40-hour working week. Tools and resources are readily available to help students master the software, but the school avoids a didactic approach. They’d rather focus on content, and let the students’ appetite for learning do the rest. Hyper Island graduates are today working in over 300 leading companies in 40 different countries within the field of interactive media and communication. And the numbers are growing.

“Hyper Island has always been a school for everyone, including people that do not feel that they fit in at traditional educational institutions,” says Mattias Hansson, CEO of Hyper Island. “We welcome this scholarship for our students, so that we at Hyper Island can continue our educational revolution together with the most sought after students in the industry. The Tomorrow Awards will be deeply rewarded in digital heaven for coming up with such a great idea. Thank you all!”

Richmond, VA, USA’s Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter has forged an undeniable reputation as one of the very best advertising schools on the planet. Helmed by former Ogilvy Worldwide Creative Director Rick Boyko, the Brandcenter’s graduates are known to leave the school with a broad understanding of the advertising and business worlds, since the two-year program has many integrated tracks : Art Direction, Copywriting, Communications Strategy, Creative Brand Management, as well as a rather new track most fitting for the Tomorrow Awards: Creative Technology.  Students from these different tracks work together to solve problems, as they would do in the real world.

The school recently invested in its facilities, by opening a brand new open-space building that houses technology labs and full video production capabilities to make sure the work and the grads coming out of the Brandcenter are both up to industry standard.

“We are very excited about the bright future we forsee for our graduates,” says Rick Boyko, Director of the VCU Brandcenter. “Our school has always been on the forefront of preparing students for the next generation of advertising and marketing leaders. This can be best illustrated by our Creative Technology track which is only a two years old and is already proving to be copied by our competition. The Tomorrow Awards’ gracious scholarship will allow us to expand the horizons of even more future creative leaders and we look forward to working with the awards to deliver on this promise.”

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These schools have time and time again proved their quality, and have produced talent that has done great things and ended up at the very highest echelons of the ad world. Both also host facilities that allow their students to be completely immersed in new technologies, and that allow them to graduate with knowledge that would put most current agency staffers to shame. Scary, isn’t it?

The Tomorrow Awards is extremely proud to partner with these schools, and to help them educate and train the greatest minds of the future..

VISIT HYPER ISLAND’S WEBSITE
VISIT VCU BRANDCENTER’S WEBSITE