ITP

… about The Country’s Top Five Digital Media and Marketing Schools.

AdAge, being a advertising trade magazine, was naturally interested in making the piece fit the greater advertising/marketing story. That being said, for anyone who knows ITP, you know it clearly falls in the “Digital Media” side more that the “Marketing” side and I did my best to express that in this piece.

ITP represent!

2. New York University, Tisch School of the Arts
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

Headed by the godmother of new media, Red Burns, ITP is not strictly an advertising program, but rather a melding of creative and scientific talent. R/GA CEO Bob Greenberg has high praise and employment contracts for standout graduates of this course. (He’s also on the Dean’s Council Advisory Board of the Tisch School of Arts.) ITP Chair Ms. Burns, who has lectured in new media at New York University since the 1970s, explains, “We don’t train people for advertising, we train people to be creative and imaginative. We want them to explore the use and value of technology.” Graduates — drawn from fields as diverse as dance, music, literature and computer science — are allowed to retain rights to projects they create in class.

In the case of Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, the class provided a forum to work on and then later sell a mobile social networking site, dodgeball.com. Google acquired the site in 2005. Mr. Rainert, who worked at R/GA as a freelancer while studying at ITP, is about to take up a new position as director, multiplatform user experience at New York-based interactive shop Schematic. Mr. Rainert says the ITP course runs the gamut from art-centric to product-centric: “I don’t think ITP specifically prepares people for advertising/agency life, but it does get people thinking about the intersection of technology and interaction and how the two can be used to create compelling experiences. … It just so happens that interactivity is becoming a huge part of advertising that will only continue to get bigger. The experience one gets at ITP is very well suited to pushing the limits of what can be done in that realm.”

The 230 students are taught by eight full-time staff and 40 adjunct professors. “They go back to the country of origin and they go to work Microsoft and everything in between,” Ms. Burns says.

Read the whole piece here.

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