Last week we were thrilled to award 125 weeks of paid placements to some of the brightest young talents in the regions at our annual B-Hive awards.

Now in its 6th year, B-Hive sees students competing across five categories - PR, marketing, advertising, digital and graphic design – with over 600 weeks of placements having been awarded in total, and many burgeoning careers launched.

We set the scheme up back in 2009 with the aim of arming students with vital experience to help them get on the creative career ladder, via competing in a Dragon’s Den style competition.

Rewind 6 years and we were in the midst of economic meltdown, yet despite redundancies and recruitment freezes we were fortunate to have extremely forward thinking clients, all as passionate as we are about helping nurture and develop the industry’s future talent.

Students graduating in this economic climate have a difficult job getting a foothold in the industry and through B-Hive, we’re committed to giving them an opportunity to do so and it’s always hugely exciting and rewarding seeing the level of talent coming through.

This year students were tasked with launching a new fashion brand that aimed to fuse the digital and physical retail space – not an easy brief to crack – with top entrants coming in to pitch their campaigns to leading industry professionals from a range of agencies and in-house communications teams.

We saw some exceptional presentations across the course of the 3 days and judges across all the commented that the standard was higher than ever.

Six students were named overall winners of their categories, all scooping numerous placements, with a number of other runners up per category also being rewarded with placements.

Overall Category Winners

• Sophie Coulson was named overall winner for the PR category, scooping placements at WPR, Rewired, Bright and RBH
• Leah Gallagher won the digital category and as a result, will enjoy placements at 383 Project, Freestyle Interactive, One Black Bear and Studio Bonito
• Adam Freeman and Lyndon Pryce were both so impressive the judges couldn’t split them, meaning they ended up joint winners of the marketing category, between them securing placements at Hammerson Bullring, First Utility, Catalyst, Orion Media and Hammerson High Cross
• Jordan Pass then ended up taking home the overall graphic design accolade, in doing so becoming the first overall category winner from Staffordshire Uni and winning placements at  Holman Group, Orb, The NEC Group and Vital Marketing
• Khushbu Patel wowed judges with her creativity and joined up thinking to take top spot in the advertising category, winning placements at Big Communications, Chapter, McCann, WAA and The Unagency

As always, we’d like to offer a huge congratulations to everyone who took part – whether you walked away a winner or not.

B-Hive might be our idea and our way of investing back in to the industry, but it’s simply wouldn’t exist without the continued backing and dedication of our judges and the local universities/colleges, so our heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who gave up their time to promote the scheme, sit on the panels and offer placements. We couldn’t do it without you. 

Full list of participating employers:

383 Project, Big Communications, Bright PR, Catalyst, Chapter, Cogent Elliott, Cognition,  First Utility, Freestyle Interactive, Holman Group, Leader, Marketing Birmingham, McCann, The NEC Group, One Black Bear, Orb, Orion Media, RBH, Rewired, Studio Bonito, The Unagency, Vital, Viva and WAA, Willoughby PR