In December 2019, Humber College in Toronto sent a class of advertising students to agency Zulu Alpha Kilo to gain real-world experience working on an important campaign. And get paid for it.
The brief given to the students was to create a campaign encouraging businesses to pay student interns. However, the project was put on hold once the pandemic hit. Today, with the backing and support of the U.S. based National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the campaign is ready to launch across North America.
“It was amazing to see the students inside an agency environment,” said Robin Heisey, who was an advertising & marketing communications professor at Humber College at the time. Heisey had reached out to Zulu Alpha Kilo’s founder Zak Mroueh about the students coming into the agency to work on a real brief.
The students made a positive impression. “They came up with dozens of ideas, but one idea from Brooke Charlinski and Joel Gerrity was a clear winner,” said Mroueh.
In the videos, the unpaid intern attempts to use non-monetary items she “earned”— swag like an agency mug, leftover bagels from the boardroom, a reference letter, and “valuable job experience”— in place of money at different establishments from a clothing store to a grocery store. The videos highlight the absurdity of unpaid, hard-working student interns trying to afford life’s necessities like groceries and rent. Mroueh got behind the camera directing all six videos through the agency’s in-house production arm, Zulubot.
Earlier this year, NACE released a position statement that calls for all internships to be paid. Now, the association is broadening that message to the general public through this “Unpaid Is Unfair” campaign. The impetus to call for an end to unpaid internships grew out of NACE’s research findings, according to Shawn VanDerziel, NACE executive director.
“We’ve found that paid internships provide college students with an important avenue to their first job. In our most recent study, we found that paid interns averaged 1.4 job offers while unpaid interns averaged less than one,” he explained. “We’ve also found that paid interns get higher starting salaries than unpaid interns in their initial jobs.”
“Many industries, not just advertising, have normalized unpaid internships and it’s not good for employers or future employees,” said Tim Gordon, chief creative officer and partner of Zulu Alpha Kilo NY, which alongside the Toronto office brought the campaign to life in the U.S. market. “We hope this helps spread the word that if you are running a business or in a hiring position, you should advocate for and help ensure all internship positions are paid.”
In addition, VanDerziel noted that “students who engage in unpaid internships must forgo an income—that’s a hardship for many students. All work deserves to be paid.” NACE’s current research shows that approximately 41% of internships are unpaid.
At the same time, said VanDerziel, paid internships benefit employers, too: “Paid internship programs serve as an effective pipeline for entry-level talent for full-time positions. The data also show that employees who have been paid interns have higher retention rates than unpaid interns or those who have never participated in an internship.”
One of the students who participated in the campaign in 2019, Laura Biggar, became a full-time writer at Zulu Alpha Kilo and worked on bringing the final campaign to life. “I can’t believe this idea started as a scribble on a page nearly four-years ago. It’s been so rewarding to see it finally executed and shared with the world,” said Biggar.
In this SHOOT Top Spot, "Paid in Mugs," a student looks to get a real estate agent/landlord to accept a piece of swag–namely a mug–as payment covering first and last month’s rent for an apartment.
