Experts say that, for every ten hours of sleep we lose, we should try and sleep an hour or two more for the next week, adding that only then we might regain some semblance of balance. If that’s the toll we have to pay for going sleepless at the 11th Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj, we aren’t going to complain much.
When we say “going sleepless”, we mean, of course, the hard work we put in to make sure the “best Weekend of the year” was organized perfectly, allowing everyone to know everything about it.
In fact, we started our preparations at the close of the last Weekend Media Festival. We drafted press releases, wrote announcements, designed and coded the mobile app, worked out elaborate media strategies and patched them up when cracks appeared, while the Content team processed and launched some of the topics talked about at the Weekend in leading media outlets.
In the end, in the three days of controlled chaos, more than 5,000 participants passed through Rovinj’s Tvornica Duhana, including some 550 journalists and 350 students. The six halls (an all-time record) hosted more than 50 presentations, panels and discussions. As expected, the biggest buzz was generated by the panel featuring speaker Zlatko Dalić, the football coach who had, just months before, led the national team to world’s silver. There were also some major crowds at the panel featuring Croatia’s most important modern author Kristian Novak, and the panel by Pete Radovich, CBS creative director. A big crowd gathered in attendance of the panel under the title “Disrupt Yourself” where Antal Bekefi of BAT, Siniša Đuranović of HT, Joško Mrndže of Google and Mladen Fruk of McKinsey discussed the necessity of change within big companies in the conxet of sudden advances in technology.
In two festival days, the press center’s desk produced 25 reports from presentations, 11 video statements by the speakers, seven press releases and innumerable photos, sometimes writing in extreme conditions, e.g. just three meters from a jazz band’s sound check. The Social team exhibited impressive real-time agility on three social networks, reporting from 32 presentations, and posting 142 tweets that gained 53,000 impressions. As of this year, the press center had a video upgrade in the form of the production guys who recorded and edited panelists’ statements for the festival’s YouTube channel.
In other news, our PR colleagues made no poor judgements when it came to deciding if 2manydj's and Bolesna Braća managed to “pump up the crowd” or “getting them to dance” at the Weekend Media Festival. The panel titled Do You Trust Your Phone, during which the security expert Alen Delić ramped up the paranoia (maybe some of it was our fault), was one of the most discussed topics before and after the festival, even outside Croatia. We are also very proud of SoMo Borac, the award for the best digital projects in the region and one of this agencies favourite projects. This year’s edition drew the biggest crowd yet, earning a spot on the festivals main stage.
In short, after 11 years, the Weekend Media Festival is by far the most relevant communication industry festival in the region, and we are extremely proud of our thread in its weave.
