At the recently held International Advertising Festival in the South Korea, Ad Stars, one of the jury members was Nikolina Popović, Creative Director of Havas Adriatic in Belgrade. This year, Ad Stars celebrates 10th anniversary so he extended its territory in seminars, exhibition and programs not only from exiting advertising creatives but to digital-technology-based digital marketing field.
“It was absolutely amazing experience in every sense, totally new culture. Great thing of the Festival was actually an overview on the creativity from that part of the world mainly. But something else that I shouldn’t forget is: on these kind of events you get to know the colleagues from all parts of the world and this might be the biggest benefit actually – exchanging ideas, experiences, thoughts – human relationships.” – she said.
As somebody who built her career around the world, from China, Ethiopia, Bratislava and Doha, she had a chance to experience various cultures and ways of doing business in the creative industry.
“What I’ve seen so far is that Serbia is still relying a lot on traditional advertising. While in the world, in Asia especially, we can see a lot of innovations, biometrics. Brands are communicating through the experience. However we at Havas Adriatic have a different approach to advertising. We use the power of the network, we use and apply powerful tools to detect the brand in the right way. Havas Adriatic as well has Meaningful Brands®. This is the first global study to show how quality of life and wellbeing connects with brands at a business level and measures the benefits brands bring to our lives. It is unique in both scale and scope; covering 1,000 brands, 300,000 people, 34 markets across 12 industries on a global level. The reason why we should all move from traditional advertising is because the nature of media and advertisement is constantly changing. The same old advertising techniques will not always work on the new generation. Nowadays brands and agencies have access to increasing volumes of data. It is important to know how to use them, how to create out of them more relevant customer experiences, more interactive and more effective. Also technology is becoming better and better and this leaves us to explore a whole new experience, in terms of creativity and strategy. We should be able to shape an experience that helps consumers connect with facets of their personality, to face their emotions that not only bring them closer to the brand but also to themselves.“– Nikolina explained.
Havas Adriatic, advertising and media buying agency, is a part of the global French communication network, one of the five strongest in the world. By using its own creative work along with unique Havas group tools, the Belgrade team is doing successful business regionally, but their quality and expertise is becoming widely known even further through collaboration with other offices of the Havas network.