The Next Step In The Ad World

From Building Her Own Brand, to Helping Other Build Theirs

Since graduating from Lynn in 2011, Francesca Piancone has created her own portfolio school for students in creative advertising called book180.

Piancone grew up with a strong entrepreneurial spirit in her family, as her father owned an Italian restaurant in New Jersey. This family dynamic helped shape her love for advertising and lead to her majoring in Advertising & PR at Lynn.

In 2022, she founded book180, a one of a kind portfolio school for post grad students looking to go into creative advertising. The company is fully woman owned, and the program takes place totally online over just a six month period, differentiating it from the other five portfolio schools in the country.

Above: Piancone & Latz tabling for book180 (Unknown, 2024).

“If you want to be a junior copywriter or a junior art director you really need a finished art portfolio of spec work or campaign work to get hired,” said Piancone. “Not a lot of universities or colleges have the capability of training you that specifically and that's why portfolio schools exist.”

The idea came about while Piancone & Co-Founder, Sarah Latz worked together at the Chicago Portfolio School, a year long program, and realized during COVID that the traditional portfolio school model needed to change.

“I was talking to so many prospective students who couldn’t physically move to a big city or wanted to save money and live at home,” said Piancone. “We wanted to help adapt a new model and make it so that more people could enter the industry overall.”

Above: Francesca Piancone (right) and Sarah Latz (left) smile for their headshot (book180, 2022).

Book 180 currently has students enrolled all over the country, from San Francisco, to Miami, and everywhere in between. All instructors in the program are currently working in the creative advertising industry, and are able to use their experience to guide recent graduates. 

“It’s helping our students a ton when applying to jobs,” said Piancone. “They have all these industry contacts and are learning from people who are fully immersed in the industry so they know how to stand out.”