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A few minutes later, he told them that this past week his former employer, Ogilvy & Mather’s New York office, had laid off a hundred of its thirteen-hundred-person workforce. “But,” he said, “not one job in the interactive division.”

To further illuminate his point, a quotation from another ad legend, Bill Bernbach, came on-screen: “Live in the current idiom and you will create it.”

This messaging sequence seemed to be consistent with the educational mix that I saw served up throughout the program during my stay: share and discuss real-world examples, add applicable inspiration from people who have done it, and thereby issue an inherent challenge for the students to make it happen on their own, smarter terms, today.

To someone who has lived much of it, the wisdom rang true and seemed to have real value. But I wondered, looking around at the students, if these were the kinds of tropes that would actually sink in, or if this audience, despite its hunger and talent, was too young and inexperienced and filled with their own ideas for most of it to make sense.

I decided that it all depended on the student, that the more conscientious individuals in the program would absorb the cocktail of facts, wisdom, and new-media opportunities and distill it into ideas and an approach that could potentially change the industry. And I imagined that for others, even the most talented and ambitious, it was meaningless without context, that wisdom wasn’t something to be imparted, but something to be gained by trying and failing to do whatever it is that’s burning a hole in their guts.

Redefining Vanity and the Many Shades of Green

Projects for students in the strategic-planning track under Professor Caley Cantrell (formerly of the Martin Agency) included creating a series of presentations that revealed original perspectives on the issues that can shape a brand’s future. On the day of my visit with her students two teams were scheduled to make multimedia presentations on their latest assignments.

Even more so than with the students in purely creative tracks, the strategic-planning students were inquisitive and outwardly and unapologetically ambitious and entrepreneurial. Unlike the creatives, many of whom believe that their ideas are an art form (more on this later), or at least much better than anything an old hack like me could have done, the planning students thought of their ideas and their experiences as calculated means to monetary and professional success.

Before they began their presentations, I asked them the obvious question: if, upon graduation, they all wanted to work as agency planners. After all, VCU strategic-planning graduates were already at many of the better agencies, including Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, Chiat\Day in Los Angeles, the Richards Group in Dallas, and Leo Burnett in Chicago. Their answers surprised me.

“Not especially,” said a tall, confident second-year student who had already gone out of his way to introduce himself to me, several times, earlier in the day. “We feel that we can take this, what we’re learning here, and go way beyond agencies. Insights and strategy can transcend advertising. They can be applied to any business model. I mean,” the twenty-three-year-old continued, “a twenty-three-year-old did Facebook. When you see something like that, you feel that for this generation, anything is possible.”

I had expected to see inspired but conventional student work, but instead I was shown two presentations that were as polished and insight driven as anything I ever experienced inside an agency. The first, delivered with practiced ease by three students, explored contemporary definitions of feminine beauty and then laid out a provocative and unexpected (especially from twenty-three-year-olds) conclusion that, if anything, revealed a huge and controversial opportunity for marketers willing to embrace and celebrate “cosmetically enhanced” beauty. Everyone plays up to natural beauty, they contended.