Undergraduate and graduate students in Boston University’s College of Communication won 12 awards given under the student category of the 56th Hatch Awards last Wednesday, marking a memorable night for the COM community, according to a press release published Thursday.
A total of 22 students from classes taught by COM professor Edward Boches and Pegeen Ryan won four silver, two bronze and six merit awards — no other school won silver or bronze, according to the release. Seventeen of them accompanied Boches to the awards ceremony.
“The Hatch Awards is one of the oldest regional creative work shows in America. Among all the regional shows, Hatch is considered the premiere,” Boches said. “It is like the Pulitzer and Oscar of advertising.”
Boches explained that Hatch rewards “powerful, inventive and original” advertisements in both traditional and modern forms, ranging from outdoor advertisement to the experiential ones. Boches said creativity has always been the heart of Hatch.
“We always encourage our portfolio advertising students who work on the creative track to participate [in Hatch],” Boches said. “We help them identify their very best works usually done in their classes and enter them in.”
Boches said that winning these awards was a form of reinforcement and validation of students’ efforts.
“The awards are judged by highly-accomplished, creative directors from the nation’s most impressive advertising agencies,” Boches said. “It always feels good to get confirmation from a third party who is really qualified to say whether something is good or not.”
Noëmie Carrant, a 2016 COM alumna, brought home one silver and one bronze award at this year’s awards. The first campaign piece she entered in the competition was done on behalf of U.N. Women, on the subject of luxury tax on tampons.
As Carrant explains, in nations like the United States and the United Kingdom, there is an extra tax on menstrual hygiene products because they are considered as “unnecessary luxuries.”
“[The tax] is ridiculous,” Carrant said. “So we decided to place tampons in iconic high-end ads, from Tiffany & Co. to Burberry, to show the absurdity of the taxing system. And we won a bronze Hatch bowl for it!”
Carrant’s second campaign piece that won the silver bowl was for a visionary phone app called “nanagrams,” which she and her partner, Grace Pearson, created together.
“It is meant to bridge the generational gap between millennials and their grandparents,” Carrant said.
Kiersten Utegg, also a 2016 COM graduate, won a bronze bowl at Hatch this year with her campaign video for Glassdoor, a website that could use its data to create transparency about the gender pay gap.
“I wrote the script for the video that explained our idea, and my two brilliant art directors made it look beautiful,” Utegg said. “We all played equal roles in publishing the idea into something that actually made sense for today’s world. We are also very proud of it because it is a real issue that we felt close to.”
Recalling his experience at the awards ceremony, Michael Philbin, a senior in COM, said it was nice to gather with the Boston creative community to celebrate good work.
“Everyone is always making such cool stuff,” Philbin said. “I also got to see a lot of my old classmates at COM, who are now working at Boston advertising agencies and winning [Hatch] bowls left and right.”
Philbin, along with his partners, won the merit award at this year’s Hatch with their collaboration “Funeral For Ideas,” which advertises COM’s Creative Cafe portfolio review system that happens at the end of every semester.
“Instead of inviting everyone to the event itself, we planned the ‘Funeral For Ideas’ for afterwards so that everybody could jokingly mourn the campaigns that creative directors might not have liked,” Philbin said.
