HOW DAD WORKS
PROGRAM AT A GLANCE
15 MONTHS
5 QUARTERS
4 DAYS / WEEK
FULL-TIME
DENVER OR ONLINE
EVERY QUARTER BUILDS
We don’t teach the same thing five times and call it progress. Each quarter asks something different of you. You start by learning how to find an idea. Then you learn to make more of them, judge them harder, repeat the process consistently, and finally decide which work is strong enough to represent you. As the work gets harder, you need less direction and expect more from yourself.
START
3 MONTHS
6 MONTHS
9 MONTHS
12 MONTHS
15 MONTHS
Q1
10 WEEKS
THINK
Dissect big ideas in all types of art, not just advertising, what makes them interesting, the truths that are behind them, and start to develop your own thoughts on what is good and bad.
Q2
10 WEEKS
MAKE
Start creating your own ideas. Most miss, but that's the point. No pressure, no expectations yet, just practice. Learn to push past your first thoughts and create in quantity.
Q3
10 WEEKS
JUDGE
The briefs get harder, expectations rise, you start to spot what’s missing in your ideas and move to fix it. Still more misses, but you've got just enough hits to inspire confidence.
Q4
10 WEEKS
REPEAT
Hold the standard again and again, brief after brief, week after week. You're hitting more than missing. Each week you're consistently producing portfolio-worthy work.
Q5
10 WEEKS
BUILD
Together we put together all the pieces and craft your final portfolio. But you're experienced enough to make a lot of the calls yourself. You do you. Trust your gut.
HOW WE BUILD PORTFOLIOS
Every Campaign Development class at DAD is done in pairs. Art Directors team with Copywriters, sometimes even Art Directors team with other Art Directors, all that matters is you've got a partner for that week's brief. Below is the journey your portfolio takes from beginning to end.
60 briefs
Across Q2, Q3, and Q4, you and a partner get a new problem to solve every week in each Campaign Development class. New brands, new categories, new partners, and new challenges that prepare you for the real thing.
CHALLENGE: get better with each brief360 ideas
We ask you and your partner to bring in six ideas for every brief. Some are smart. Some are weird. Some are obvious. Some suck. That’s the point. The volume teaches you that only the best rise to the top.
CHALLENGE: KEEP GOING AFTER your first IDEA400 all-in
At the end of Q4 you get together as a group and decide which of everyone's 360 ideas from every week are worth bringing to Cutdown Day. Then you deliver those to DAD Creative Directors who start cutting until they get to the best of best.
CHALLENGE: BE WILLING TO KILL YOUR FAVORITES50 left
More than 300 ideas are gone without mercy. Then we start our final cuts together as a group — and these aren't easy. Old favorites die. Forgotten ideas suddenly look better. Nothing survives just because somebody spent a lot of time on it.
CHALLENGE: defend what you believe in6 win
Everyone ends Cutdown Day with the six pieces that will end up in their book alongside their partners. Cutdown Day is the biggest event of your time at DAD, but it's also just the beginning... now you've gotta go make the damn things.
challenge: find the six you'll enjoy making10 weeks
Over the last 10 weeks in your final quarter, Q5, your final six get produced. Every piece is blown out, every thought is over-thought, and the final product is something you and the DAD Creative Directors are all happy with.
challenge: find the fun in the act of makingTIME COMMITMENT
Classes run Monday through Thursday, mornings, afternoons, or evenings. Outside class, there are briefs to solve, partners to meet with, pitches to prepare, ideas to rewrite, and work to make. You can still have a part-time job and a life, but DAD isn’t casual — and neither is the agency job you want.
A WEEK AT DAD
Part-time job
Class
Work solo
Work solo
Part-time job
Part-time job
Work solo
Class
Work with partner
Work with partner
Work with partner
Part-time job
Part-time job
Work with partner
Work solo
Class
Class
Class
Be a person.
Go do something.
Do nothing.
THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE OF ONE WAY A STUDENT MIGHT FIT PART-TIME WORK, PARTNER TIME, SOLO WORK, AND A LIFE AROUND DAD.
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THE CURRICULUM
You’re not taking a random pile of creative classes. Every part of the curriculum is there to build a specific part of you as a creative — the ideas, the craft, the taste, or the ability to actually do this with other people for a living.
WHO TAKES WHAT
ART DIRECTION
COPYWRITING
SHARED
01
Can you find something worth making? These are the classes where you learn how to solve briefs, build campaigns, and keep finding ideas after the first one.
SHARED
Q1
Learn how to turn a problem into a simple, surprising idea that can become something bigger.
SHARED
Q2–Q4
Solve brief after brief with different partners, categories, and Creative Directors until finding campaign ideas starts to become second nature.
SHARED
Q4
Build ideas that can live beyond traditional ads through stunts, activations, social, and the places people actually spend their attention.
SHARED
Q4
Work on compressed timelines and learn how to find strong ideas when there isn’t endless time to think about them.
02
Can you make the idea as good as the thinking? These classes are about writing it, designing it, shaping it, refining it, and making the execution stronger.
SHARED
Q1
Take the big idea and sharpen how you communicate it, learning how a few carefully chosen words can make the thinking land harder.
COPYWRITING
Q1
Build the fundamentals of writing clearly, deliberately, and with enough personality that somebody actually wants to keep reading.
ART DIRECTION
Q1
Learn the fundamentals of composition, hierarchy, layout, and visual communication that every Art Director needs underneath the ideas.
ART DIRECTION
Q2
Push the visual side of an idea further by refining the look, tone, composition, photography, design, and details that make it feel finished.
COPYWRITING
Q2
Take good writing further by revising, tightening, and finding the voice that makes the idea feel unmistakably itself.
ART DIRECTION
Q2
Build enough technical fluency to make what you see in your head instead of letting the software decide what your idea looks like.
COPYWRITING
Q2
Learn how writing changes when it has to live in the physical world, from outdoor and environmental work to experiences people move through.
ART DIRECTION
Q3
Learn how type can create hierarchy, emotion, personality, and meaning instead of simply carrying the words.
COPYWRITING
Q3
Write for movement, timing, sound, dialogue, and all the things that happen when words stop sitting still on a page.
COPYWRITING
Q3
Learn how the same basic message can sound completely different depending on the brand, audience, context, and voice.
ART DIRECTION
Q4
Create a visual identity system that can stretch across different pieces while still feeling like one coherent brand.
COPYWRITING
Q4
Develop your own voice as a writer and make work that feels less like an assignment and more like something only you would make.
03
Do you know what good looks like, where ideas come from, and what the world is talking about? These classes build references, judgment, curiosity, and a creative point of view.
SHARED
Q1
Look closely at great creative work, build stronger references, and get better at understanding why you think something is good.
ART DIRECTION
Q1
Learn to look beyond advertising for inspiration and start developing a broader visual point of view.
ART DIRECTION
Q2
Study the work that came before you, understand influence, and learn how references can become raw material for something new.
ART DIRECTION
Q3
Turn looking and thinking into making, experimenting with visual approaches that expand what your work can look and feel like.
SHARED
AWARDS
Take on D&AD New Blood briefs built around real brands, real cultural problems, and the kind of ambitious thinking that gets noticed outside school.
SHARED
AWARDS
Solve One Show Young Ones briefs with an eye toward culture, relevance, and ideas strong enough to compete on an international stage.
04
Can you prepare, present, and sell the work professionally? These classes turn finished creative work into a finished portfolio and prepare you to take it into the industry.
SHARED
Q5
Take the strongest campaign ideas you’ve made and push every piece until the campaign is ready to earn a place in the portfolio.
ART DIRECTION
Q5
Refine, produce, organize, and present your strongest visual work so the portfolio looks ready to be shown professionally.
COPYWRITING
Q5
Revisit the writing across your strongest work, tightening every headline, script, description, and detail before it goes into the portfolio.
SHARED
Q5
Learn how to present an idea, explain the thinking, read the room, answer questions, and make people want to come with you.
SHARED
Q5
Learn how to take the finished portfolio into the industry, from presenting yourself and your work to navigating the actual job search.
WANT TO DIVE DEEPER INTO EACH PROGRAM?
WHAT CLASSES FEEL LIKE
HERE’S THE DIFFERENCE
There are only a few lecture-style classes at DAD when you're learning the fundamentals in Q1. But most classes work differently. You do the work before class, put it on the big screen, pitch your ass off, and let your Creative Director push it. Then the next team goes, and the next, and so on. There’s a friendly competition to it, of course you want to pitch the idea everyone else wishes they’d thought of, but that pressure works in your favor. When someone raises the bar, everyone starts reaching higher.
THINGS YOU MIGHT HEAR IN CLASS FROM THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
“What's the truth here?”
“Do you actually believe in this?”
“We need more tension.”
“Push that one.”
“Kill the rest.”
THINGS YOU MIGHT HEAR IN CLASS FROM THE STUDENTS
“Read #3 again.”
“We had similar ideas, but yours is better!”
“What if you did this instead?”
“That line is the whole campaign.”
“I saw something that might help.”
WHY THE WHOLE ROOM MATTERS
Then the room takes over. You hear everyone’s feedback, people jump in, ideas get pushed, defended, killed, revived, and your opinion can change three times in five minutes. If you’re engaged, you'll hear lessons in every conversation — sometimes the most useful feedback you hear all night wasn’t even meant for you.
FEEDBACK MAKES YOU BETTER
Making something is only the beginning. Critique exposes what you can’t see, forces you to explain your choices, and pushes the work beyond where you would have taken it on your own. Great creatives don’t get great by being told everything works. They get great by being challenged to make it better.
WHY WE CRITIQUE
👀
You’re too close to your own work to see everything.
💬
If you can’t explain why the choice is there, maybe it shouldn’t be.
🪞
The goal isn’t to protect what you made; it’s to make it better.
⚖️
You don’t blindly take every note. You learn which notes reveal a real problem, which solution is right, and when to defend the work.
📈
Once somebody shows you how much further an idea can go, “pretty good” gets harder to accept.
🧠
The end goal is not needing a Creative Director to tell you what’s wrong. It’s learning to hear that voice in your own head.
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WORKING WITH PARTNERS
Advertising is a team sport. Copywriters and Art Directors always work together in agencies and have to agree, disagree, compromise, defend ideas, kill ideas, divide the work, and share the credit. So in Campaign Development classes, we keep changing who you work with every week so when you get into an agency you'll be the ultimate team player.
Maybe you click immediately. Great. Don’t get too comfortable.
Different taste. Different process. Different way of getting to the idea.
Maybe this one is harder. That might be the more useful rep.
You learn when to push, when to listen, and when the other person’s idea is simply better.
By now you’re not just learning everybody else. You’re learning yourself.
WHO YOU LEARN FROM
There are no career professors at DAD. Hell, most of us barely even want to be called teachers. We just happen to be agency people who have worked in the business long enough that we now want to help young people get to the level we're at. We're great at giving feedback in our agency jobs, which makes us especially qualified to give you feedback at DAD. If you want to work in an agency one day, doesn't it make sense to learn from the people who already work there?
DO YOU WANT YOUR TEACHERS TO CHECK THESE BOXES?
✓
Works in the industry right now?
✓
As an actual creative?
✓
Has big agency experience?
✓
Can give real creative feedback?
✓
Knows the quality of agency work?
✓
Wants to be called “Professor”?
WHY THAT MATTERS
Your teachers bring the industry into class as it exists right now — what agencies are making, what creative directors expect, how ideas get sold, how the work gets produced, what technology is changing, and what it takes to get hired. You’re not learning the business from someone who remembers it. You’re learning it from someone who’s in it.
THE POINT OF ALL OF THIS
That’s the system. Five quarters of missing a lot of shots, making the ones that matter, getting pushed, getting better, learning to judge your own work, and eventually trusting yourself to make the call. The portfolio proves what you can do today. We care just as much about what you’ll be ready to make tomorrow.
