Knitted bubble socks and kilts! Whoosh. Out of the air, an idea lands on her desk. A brainstorming session is in full flow.

Every image floating by Denise Kinsella's third-storey window is netted, hauled in and added to the pile. She and her colleague, Ariana Akbor, are in the process of creating a concept for a new add campaign to promote a new TG4 dance programme, called Rianta. "We're the only female creative team here," says Kinsella looking around the offices of McConnells Advertising on the Grand Canal. It's only months since they graduated from DIT Aungier Street with a MSc in advertising. Now they work together as a creative team.

Putting their thinking caps on, they chew on pencils. They chew on fingers. They play CDs. They draw sketches on their scribble pads. They write words on the green-board. The ideas fly until the concept is finally formed. The dynamic duo spend the morning fine-tuning their idea.

The next stage is that Kinsella and Akbor must turn the "concept" into an add. They hold a casting session, looking for three girls and two boys, who will be styled and photographed and appear in adds in magazines and newspapers. As Kinsella explains, these young people will be dressed from the waist up in clubby, funky gear with sparkly hip hair, but from the waist down they will wear traditional ceili costumes. The add will play on what the public's perception of a dance programme on TG4 is likely to be and also "playing on the word dance".

The job is just what she wanted to do. It's creative, fast, fun and ever-changing. She recalls how she loved doing art projects at school. "I though that I might be able to do something like sketching, thinking of ideas, something creative." What Kinsella loves especially about the job is that she and her partner are in control of the add themselves. "We are totally trusted. You do what you want to. It's your project. We start with a new project every couple of weeks. We have great control and it's really rewarding."

After her Leaving Cert at St Tiernan's community school in Co Dublin, she says: "I knew exactly what I couldn't do. I could never do something that would involve too much mathematics, too much methodical. I didn't want anything rigid, where there wouldn't be any scope for my ideas and my own development. I loved my Junior Cert projects."

She recalls the dedication of her art teacher, Vivienne Dowling, who allowed her develop her interest in art and discover her strengths.

After graduating from UCD with a BA hons degree in sociology and Greek and Roman civilisation, she chose advertising realising that many of the modules she choose to study in college were connected with the world of advertising and the media. Her thesis for her master's looked at the "Representation of the Sexes: How do You Identify with your Mediated Self".

Since starting work, she's "done a lot of pitches", making presentations on behalf of McConnells to clients who may be shopping for a fresh creative approach to selling their product. "It's a very aggressive industry, you have to be totally motivated."

She's currently working on a 30-second television add for a large paint company. "It's very exciting and rare for a young team to work on something like that," she says with pride. She works "like a crazy lady" because, she says, smiling happily: "I just like the way my working day is. It's very unglamorous." But she's not frowning at all when she's saying this.