Kate Humphries, Programme Director for Creative Advertising at Media Design School and recent winner of the Comms Council’s Outstanding Achievement award, talks about developing creativity within the younger generation and the food she could eat forever.
What does your day-to-day life look like at Media Design School?
A chaos of joyful bits, humbling bits, and frustrating bits all mashed in, with me barely holding it together. But somehow it works. It should also be noted that I work with a dedicated, full-on, hard-working bunch of passionate people at MDS. And, when they don’t stay in their lanes, they’re inspirational.
As programme director for creative advertising at Media Design School and having won the Comms Council’s Outstanding Achievement award, you must love working to foster the creativity of future generations. Why is that?
It’s unpredictable. Every single year is a white-knuckle ride. For nine months you’re on your toes, constantly having to tweak the alchemy of the room. But then, there’s the bliss of seeing people fall in love with ideas, of seeing an unexpected pairing suddenly go off like a crazed firework, of seeing sheer delight wrap itself around an entire cohort when last year’s 52 MadStars finalist bursts into the room.
What else do I love? The two-way learnings, where you learn just as much from them as they do from you. The ongoing conversation between students and industry mentors, where you get to witness a much tighter idea unpeeling itself. And, as the year draws to a close, seeing a student team start to trust their gut on an idea.
Specifically working with the younger generation, what do you think they will bring into the next era of creative advertising?
I think they will bring insight, together with a media neutrality that will allow them to effortlessly unfold an idea in the places where they spend their time. I’ve witnessed it happening over the last few years with idea after idea that cleverly uses gaming platforms in so many unexpected ways.
I think this will happen more and more, as the joy of the glittering surfaces on which they live fuses with what they’ve learnt in their time with us. That delightful awe that can happen when you stop and dig a bit, and just like that, a new form of play emerges for a brand.
When it comes to bringing out the creativity in other people, what does that process look like?
A lot of time initially is spent on removing the hefty obstacles people put in their own way.
It’s also about getting them to trust the process, to be both relaxed and deliberate with cultivating different areas of the brain. To be clever and strategic when they need to be. And, at other times, to be boldly and unashamedly stupid in their creative leaps. It also involves them learning to know when to park their own ego and allow their creative partner, tutor, or industry mentor to coax, tease and draw out the threads of their insights and ideas.
Quickfire 5
Favourite cuisine you could eat every day?
Don’t make me choose! When push comes to shove, my comfort food will always be Catalan. In fact, I’m off right now to rub raw garlic on charred bread and slather it with oily anchovies.
Live in the 90s or 2000s?
Both.
First country you’ve been to?
When I was six months old, my parents hot-footed it from Aotearoa to the UK via a big Italian cruise liner. That right there,
I believe, was a whole country
in itself.
Best book you’ve read?
Oh God, again, choosing. I read like a beast, it is my joy and my anchor. But I love Steve Toltz, A Fraction
of the Whole. It teems with a love of language.
Three words to describe yourself?
Not really here
This was first published in the 2024 June-July NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
