Brandcenter Students Excel at 2020 Griffin Farley's Beautiful Minds
Brandcenter students rose to the top at the 2020 Griffin Farley's Beautiful Minds program this fall, with Payal Pereira (ST, 2021) and her team taking home the winning title.
The Beautiful Minds Program, presented by BBH, is a hybrid planning bootcamp and networking event. Participants first get a free crash course in planning from some of the top planners in the industry. They are then split into teams of 4-5 and given a chance to apply their learnings to a brief. Each team is assigned mentors from various agencies. The teams that best addressed the brief present their strategies in front of a room packed full of heads of departments and recruiters.
This fall, the two-week intensive program saw 60 strategists participating from all over the world. Teams were given a brief for Good Call NYC, an arrest hotline that connects you to a lawyer in just 32 seconds. Each team had just four days to work on the brief. Only four of the 14 teams were selected to present at the final Gala, and this year all four teams that were selected had one Brandcenter student on each team: Lucy Mungo (ST, 2021), Gabriela Olivera (XD, 2021), Payal Pereira (ST, 2021), and Sheila Villalobos (ST, 2021).
"It was two weeks of hustling with some of the most talented people I've met," says Pereira. "Although my team and I were in three different time zones, we worked really well together and learned so much. It was so amazing that my classmates who were on other teams also made it to the finals, so we got to cheer for each other till the very end. We presented to over 180 people at the Gala, but it wasn't as intimidating because it almost felt like another day at Brandcenter."
Griffin Farley was a Strategy Director at BBH who lost his battle to mesothelioma in 2013. The Griffin Farley's Beautiful Minds program was started in his memory, as Farley dedicated much of his time to helping junior strategists hoping to break into the industry.
Congratulations to our student participants!