In companies full of coffee runners and unpaid interns, junior creatives can have a hard time breaking into the glamorous world of advertising. But there’s a company that offers more to these award winners of tomorrow.

Through its Year One program, Colour grants an opportunity for junior creatives to launch their advertising careers. In 2008, Colour ran Year One for the third time – this time looking for a junior copywriter to join the Halifax agency.

The successful candidate is offered a starter package that includes a one-year contract, an apartment in Halifax, and a moving allowance to help with all the details of setting up and settling in. Oh yeah, the budding copywriter is also given real advertising briefs and a tree’s worth of paper.

It is not an internship. It is a real job with pay, equipped with a demanding Creative Director to vet the work and above all, the chance to build a killer portfolio. At the end of the year, the parties may decide to continue the relationship. If not, the employee will have a portfolio he or she can proudly take to any agency in the world.

This time around, the successful candidate is Steve Wallace.  Steve graduated from the University of Guelph’s Honour History program in 2005 and Humber College’s Advertising Copywriting program in 2008.  He completed an internship at Fingerprint Communications in Toronto and a second at MacLaren McCann before joining the Colour team this Fall as Junior Copywriter.

Steve took the plunge as Colour’s 'Year One Guy' figuratively, when he made the move to Halifax before ever stepping foot in the city, and literally, when he recently tasted salt water for the first time.