The 12th Weekend media festival u Rovinj was organised on Sept. 19-22, with the slogan “Three days of peace, love and communication!”. I was privileged to be a member of the selected five- member Represent Communications team and to attend this event for the first time.

Working in Represent Communications is a privilege for a man, because you work in a predominantly female organisation. A privilege, an obligation, as well as an opportunity to find out and learn a lot about women directly from women. Most of my male friends think that I am especially honoured, because they work in industries where lack female colleagues at work, to put it mildly.

A car trip from Belgrade to Rovinj and back with four women is definitely something special. A challenge for some, a special pleasure for me. I’m usually quite satisfied when I travel with one woman only. It will suffice to say that Stefan Đurić, a.k.a. Rasta, travelled with a male friend and could only be full of envy while waiting at a border crossing in a car next to ours. And he waited for an hour.

The Represent System team was lucky enough to be accommodated in the excellent and popular Family Hotel Amarin, located on a peninsula close to Rovinj, in magnificent Mediterranean gardens. Thank you, Milica, for booking the hotel on time, because many people from Belgrade failed to do so. Each day after lectures, we relaxed and swam in the warm sea, then visited a sauna for a couple of times and were ready to party. And we did party…

On the first festival day, on Thursday evening, the Adria Media Group organised a traditional socialising event in the Veli Jože Restaurant, where we exchanged experiences and impressions with peers from the media, clients and other agencies. In addition, Direct Media organised a traditional get-together on the closing evening at the Sidro Restaurant, attended by many guests from the region.

About the Festival:

My first impression about the Festival is the perfect organisation at every step. Lectures were organised simultaneously in five different conference rooms, with more than 150 speakers during the three days of the event.

The topics were mainly related to digital communication of individuals from the creative industry and company which are increasingly advertising in the virtual world. The Facebook platform is recording a significant drop compared to Instagram. Data and digital era have made us smarter. Celebrities have assumed roles of leading influencers, and thus a participant in one of the panels was a regional music star, Severina, who talked about trends she needed to follow in order to stay on top.

Examples provided by Voja Žanetić (Pljiž TV show) and Svetozar Raspopović (AS Restaurant, Slovenia) have taught us that you never cease to learn and that it’s never too late to change jobs, even at a later stage of life, and achieve success you’ve dreamed of.

The Digital Challenges workshop discussed the use of robots in the near future for performing a great number of tasks instead of people. Two-thirds of today’s primary school children will be doing jobs that don’t even exist today. In 20 or 30 years, major global companies will have a business model dependant on digital processes, and this mainly refers to companies in Asia which haven’t been established yet.

A panel moderated by Boris Kovaček, the chief executive producer of the Festival, with Pete Radovich, one of the most successful TV producers in the USA, the Emmy Award winner, who talked about the importance of doing our job in a relaxed fashion and creativity-killing stress and how to avoid it, was particularly interesting for people with stressful jobs.

Quality content is still precious and there are no indications that the situation will change any time soon, as concluded at the “How Will the TV World Transform?” panel.

Vladimir Lučić from the Telekom Srbija Group says that “big players such as Disney, NBC and Apple will develop better platforms than Netflix in the next two years, and that they will find a way to adjust to a user and then change a strategy towards providers”.

Sara Fischer from US’ Axios thinks that the world is currently oversaturated with streaming platforms, but that the trend is gradually slowing down, with growing investments in content which is more produced by streaming services such as Netflix than by TV stations.

Another ongoing trend is the growth of ephemeral communication, namely increasing reluctance to share our privacy with others, which is why we are turning to Instagram Story and encrypted messages. People are starting to communicate more via apps which offer encrypted messages than via social media.

We brought many impressions from Rovinj. I believe that very soon we will implement in our work some of things we had an opportunity to hear.

I had an opportunity and a great pleasure to share peace, love and communication at #weekend12.