In a historic first for the D&AD New Blood Awards, a group of VCU Brandcenter students have won a second consecutive Black Pencil, the competition’s ultra-rare and highest honor.
Alex Ward (Art Direction, 2025), Henry Coffey (Copywriting, 2025), Callum Leitenberg (Copywriting, 2025), Boyan Zlatarski (Copywriting, 2025), and Emma Kerencheva (Creative Brand Management, 2025) earned both a Black Pencil and Yellow Pencil for their guerilla marketing campaign “ads for rats.”
The irreverent, comedic work featured tiny rat-sized billboards on the streets of New York featuring big brands on a tiny scale. The campaign was picked up by press including Ad Age, USA Today, Yahoo!, and even a local NYC news station for a televised news segment. What started as a conversation with friends under a tree in Brooklyn last summer ultimately made its way to the stage in London, standing out among thousands of entries from emerging creatives around the world.
“Tonight we became the first group in D&AD history to win back-to-back New Blood Black Pencils,” Coffey shared. “I still can’t believe it.”
“Winning one Black Pencil is an extraordinary achievement. Winning two, with the same team, is history-making,” said Vann Graves, executive director of the Brandcenter. “This moment is a reflection of our students’ talent and resilience and the strength of the creative community that surrounds them here.”
Last year, the same team was honored for their campaign “Scan to Revolt” developed for an Adobe brief, which encouraged Gen Z to take on design clichés by creating and submitting their own reimagined work using Adobe tools. That win marked the Brandcenter’s first-ever Black Pencil. Read more about the 2024 win here.
This year’s victory adds to a growing list of accolades for the Brandcenter. Just weeks earlier, the program was named the #1 graduate portfolio school in the U.S. for the second year in a row by The One Club for Creativity, recognizing the strength of student work across disciplines in the Young Ones competition. Read more here.
With this unprecedented repeat, Brandcenter students are continuing to set the bar for what’s possible in creative education, and showing the world what happens when bold ideas are met with collaboration, strategy, craft, and the steady guidance of mentors including faculty members Berwyn Hung, Tom Scharpf (Art Direction, 1998), and Jess Collins (Strategy, 2010).
In addition to the honors received by “ads for rats,” three other Brandcenter teams were awarded pencils at the New Blood awards, bringing home an additional Yellow Pencil and two Graphite Pencils for their excellence in creative work.
“Chewelry by Extra” created by team members Emme Schumacher (Art Direction, 2025), Tanmay Kumar (Art Direction, 2025), Jackson Wald (Copywriting, 2025), Joe Wint (Copywriting, 2025), and Joy Zhou (Strategy, 2025) earned a prestigious Yellow Pencil. The campaign aims to take the stigma out of chewing stims with a fashion-forward customizable line of chewelry that gives people with chewing stims something they can safely and unabashedly chew on.
“No Exclamation Needed,” a campaign for Yahoo! by team members Nithya Charles (Art Direction, 2025), Maddie Edwards (Art Direction, 2025), Hannah Kakish (Copywriting, 2025), and Ellie Wilson (Creative Brand Management, 2025), stemmed from the fact that women use 170% more exclamation marks than men in communication in order to seem agreeable and non-aggressive. The ultimate goal is to serve as a reminder that women shouldn’t have to shout to be heard — no exclamation needed – and the project was awarded a Graphite Pencil.
“cheese.gg” for Kraft Mac & Cheese by team members Chen Li (Art, Direction, 2026), Lori Tsai (Art Direction, 2026), and Casey Hickman also earned a Graphite Pencil. The campaign saw an opportunity to link the brand to gaming culture with an insight from the slang term “cheese,” which references a game hack or tactic that’s too easy to use and too good. Too easy and too good? Enter Kraft with cheese.gg, a website gamers can turn to whenever they’re in need of cheese for the game they’re playing.
In addition to a growing collection of Pencils, Brandcenter students made up more than 20% of all advertising portfolio winners at the New Blood Awards—more than any other program worldwide. Read more here.