The festival spaces of the old Tobacco Factory will host around 4000 media, marketing, and PR professionals at the Weekend Media Festival in Rovinj for the sixth time this year and for the first time in the European Union, which will take place from September 19 to 22.
Applications for this year’s Weekend are coming not only from Croatia and all countries in the region but also from a number of European countries. The largest regional communications festival brings a series of interesting lectures, intriguing panels, workshops, and presentations, along with relaxed socializing and excellent entertainment at numerous concerts and parties that conclude the summer season in Rovinj.
Renowned speakers have always been a strong asset of the Weekend Media Festival. This year, among others, lectures will be held by the director of the Belgrade Philharmonic, Ivan Tasovac; Tom Buday, head of marketing and consumer communication at Nestlé; German business strategy professor Nicholas Kfuri; and Nir Korczak, head of the export sector at Google Israel, who will speak about the relationship between local and global in the digital world.
For a successful breakthrough in culture, support from the state is not enough; broader public support and private sector involvement are also necessary. Ivan Tasovac, the director of the Belgrade Philharmonic, knows this best, as he will give a lecture at the Weekend on how cultural institutions, usually intended for a narrow circle of people, can be brought closer to a wider audience with will and a sense of communication. Tasovac engaged even the Roma orchestra Black Panthers in the project of the great return of the Belgrade Philharmonic to the center of Serbia’s cultural life, which played on a Belgrade raft wearing shirts that read ‘Black Panthers love the Belgrade Philharmonic!’ Tasovac is also behind the regional cooperation of the Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana Philharmonics, which is one of the few successful examples of regional cooperation in institutional culture.
Twenty-somethings, failed students, and total outsiders can become successful business people, even if they lack contacts, connections, references, and big clients. How? The recipe is provided by Viktor Marohnić, one of the speakers at the 6th Weekend Media Festival. Marohnić is a co-founder and director of ShoutEm Five Minutes Studio from the USA, and in Rovinj, he will talk about how to start a business and create a large respectable company. He claims that he is more pleased when he can spend the same amount of time and money for a client like the small bakery Vjesnik than for one of the ten largest Croatian or 500 largest American companies, because ‘Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all started by solving the problems of small people who do not have money for expensive solutions.’ Therefore, his lecture in Rovinj carries the intriguing title ‘Why is Vjesnik Bakery your dream client?’ Creating a product that is not expensive and sells in large quantities is not easy, but that is precisely the approach that makes everyone want to have their fingers in the software industry. Creating software once and then selling it two, three, ten, or one hundred million times at no additional cost – that feels even better than owning a chicken that lays golden eggs, emphasizes Marohnić.
