Golden Drum opened its doors
19th International Advertising Festival Golden Drum has today, 2 October, started to drum on the Slovenian coast. More than 50 speakers will in four festival days in Portorož, Slovenia hold lectures, panel discussions and workshops on different subjects about trends, new agendas, opportunities, new agency models and forms of creativity. The two Golden Drum Juries have announced the first finalists in group A-N and Q. The Hall of Fame became richer with two names of great personas who contributed immensely to the development of creativity in New Europe: Ami Hasan, Founder, Chief Creative Officer and Chairman of advertising agency hasan & partners, Finland and great Hungarian creative mind, the late Juli Nemes († February 2011). 
Their names joined the names: Jure Apih, Adrian Botan, Michael Conrad, Ivan Čimburov, Jan Mariusz Demner, Meta Dobnikar, Jiri Mikeš, Milka Pogliani, Daniel Ružička, Dragan Sakan († 3. 10. 2010), Juraj Vaculik, Vital Verlič, Darek Zatorski and Jarek Ziebinski.
Finalists are announced on Golden Drum’s website:
//www.goldendrum.com/competition/showcase/shortlist-2012/.
Golden Drum’s Program
After the initial screenings of Golden Drum 2012 Entries and live presentations of group Q finalists competing for Golden Watch Award, Lenja Faraguna Papp, International consultant/speaker/coach, Radio Advertising Bureau Slovenia and Adrian Botan, VP Creative Excellence for McCann Erickson CEE, Creative Partner of Bucharest office, Romania took the stage, along with five top class speakers at The Great Ads Seminar.
Lenja Faragun Papp is a radioholic from Slovenia. In today’s presentation she showed many of the benefits of using the radio as an advertising medium. True, perception of radio is pretty bad: advertising agencies believe they cannot sell radio ads to their clients; advertisers doubt that anyone is actually listening to the radio and believe that their agency is never promoting radio to them; and radio stations have a feeling their offers are constantly being turned down and that agencies are only interested in discounts. Luckily, radio reality is far better. Faragun Papp presented a research showing that radio seams more lively to people then TV, gets them into a better mood then TV, is more trustworthy then TV, is more fun, less boring, less serious… then TV. Radio has all the characteristics of a good friend.
Ads should be produced in that way: message in more important than creativity. A few hints by Faragun Papp would be: don’t shout, seduce the listener. Radio is the most visual medium of all; it encourages listeners to make their own movie in their head using just words. Therefore, visualize the results of the product/service being advertised. Copywriters should pay attention to use only ‘me’ or ‘you’ in their text, active verbs and present tense. Not to communicate more than one thing at a time and to avoid clichés. A good radio ad is using four languages: speech, sound effects, music and … silence. So, use it!
Adrian Botan, creative director, McCann Erickson Romania, who took home two Grand Prix Awards and a Titanium award at the last years’ Cannes Advertising Festival, being thus first in Eastern and Central Europe. All that for an ad campaign that is as Romanian as it can be (for Rom chocolate bars).
In his today’s presentation he was suggesting advertising people to stop producing globalized, polished, sterilised ads and to present themselves the way they are really like. Just as Poland did using the stereotype of Polish plumbers and nurses as main characters in their ads to invite tourists to come to Poland. Botan believes that a little bit of self-irony, the way New Zealand or Argentina have done it, could help produce more creative, more noticeable ads. It is better to present the ugly truth, just like Coca Cola did in India with its much awarded series of print ads, more real than the reality itself. Botan suggests to stop searching for excuses (“our market is small, our budget is tiny, out history is sad”) and to expose our weaknesses as well as our benefits. After all, they are ours!
Round table on great ads brought famous creative people (Luis Tauffer, Creative Director, BBDO Moscow; Ali Bati, Executive Creative Director, Lowe Istanbul; Marco Cremona, Executive Creative Director, Y&R Moscow; Marco Antonio Do Nascimento, Head of Art, Y&R, Prague and Jean-Paul Lefebvre, Executive and Creative Director, Abracadabra Belgium), talking about the “behind the scenes” of their ads and highlighting the power of the chosen medium… and luck. For example, a print ad was chosen for the cover of the Lürzer’s Archive and later won many awards (under a different name) the next year (not being noticed at all a year before). Or a song, that was far from musical charts, until it was used in a TV campaign. Or the one about the client, who fell for the creative’s idea so much he started to make similar ads himself.
Piran Portorož Poster Award
Tomorrow the Piran Portorož Poster Award Jury, lead by Jure Apih, Honorary President of the Golden Drum Festival, will announce the finalists among the 164 entries of this year’s Off Drum Competition. The winners will be honoured at the Friday’s Awards Ceremony.
Golden Drummers Get Together
First party of the Festival where old acquaintances and new faces meet was held on the Aurora Terrace of the Grand Hotel Bernardin. DJ Maj, accompanied by drummer Marco De Konga, prepared for a lively atmosphere that continued with electronic sounds late in the night.
Additional information at the festival website www.goldendrum.com or at borut.odlazek@goldendrum.com.
