• by Larissa Faw , January 16, 2020

The One Club has scheduled this year’s global “Portfolio Night” for May 20, with 22 agencies in 23 cities around the world so far signing on as host cities. Additional locations will be added in the coming weeks.

Attendance varies by city, but each venue averages between 50-100 aspiring creatives who present their portfolios before a panel of judges. These participants typically include recent college graduates looking to break into the industry and people who've already spent maybe a year or two at an agency and want outside feedback on their portfolio.

Portfolio evaluations come from mentors selected by each agency/organization host. For a large agency host, it will mostly be members of their creative teams.  In some cases, particularly if a smaller agency is hosting, it can be a mix of the host agency's creatives plus creatives at other agencies in the city.

At the end of the evening, the host agency in each city selects one Portfolio Night participant with the best portfolio to become a “Portfolio Night All-Star.”  The One Club will then pay for flights and hotel for all of these All-Stars to travel to New York to work for a week as a team on a creative brief for a major global brand. 

This unique global event that serves as a “high-visibility opportunity for agencies and creative directors to give back to the industry by guiding the earliest steps of future copywriters, art directors, designers and technologists,” says Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club for Creativity.

Hosts for confirmed cities to date are Arnold (Boston), BETC (Paris), Brokaw (Cleveland), Cairo Ad School (Cairo), Círculo de Creativos (Buenos Aires), Clube Criativos de Portugal (Lisbon), DDB Colombia (Bogota), Dieste (Dallas), Dotwell (Shenzhen), Goodby Silverstein & Partners (San Francisco), GTB (Detroit), Happiness Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), i2mago (Guangzhou), Inbrax (Santiago), Kyoorius (Mumbai), Lanfranco & Cordova (Lima), McGarrah Jessee (Austin), Publicis (Seattle), Serviceplan (Beijing), Tank (Montréal), Team Dubai/B&W (Dubai) and VMLY&R (London and New York).

The program began in 2003.