The last day Kalidays offered the participants three interesting lectures. The first one – Communication challenges of presidential campaign 2007 by Vuk Čosić covered brief overview of the presidential campaign of Danilo Türk.

He explained how goals were set and showed us how important web is in such campaigns. The candidate wrote blog every day in the morning and at 7 a.m. it was posted online, all videos were added to YouTube, they opened a facebook account, all photos were available at flickr, news were posted shortly after all events. There was also an interesting online chat session where some influential slovenian bloggers were invited to participate and they were writing about it very favorably the next day. It was interesting to see that the site got 62,020 visits and 249.902 page views since it is online. Also interesting was the fact that contextual ads were more efficient (ToboAds) and that they have consciously set goals not to engage in negative campaign – in contrast with the other candidate.

The second lecture was about social responsibility. After a short overview we have looked ad some ads which were or were not socially responsible. It gave me a really good insight in the topic. Thanks to Anita Hrast and Sašo Urukalo.

The final chat was held by Boštjan Napotnik (the Top Shop voice). He invited Damijan Miklavčič, Kamenko Kesar and Rok Terkaj to talk about ideas. It seems that laziness is a big factor in generating ideas. :D

Here are also some ideas for Kinoteka’s billboard from the competition:

I think that we all had a great time participating at these workshops/lectures and that there is no doubt that we will come next year. See you all.

The third day of Start Smart workshop began with short presentation about how to sell an idea. The key is to prepare for the answers and be sure to have an answer to the question Why is your idea good? And even for good ideas you must fight for – they don’t sell themselves! In addition they suggested that a good brief should be max. one and a half A4 pages long. And feel free to refuse a brief if it is not prepared the way it should be. And above all analyze the problem – this way you can create more ideas.

The second lecture was prepared by Suna Tancig and Benjamin Ivančič from the agency Original. It was about how ideas and concepts in advertising should support the brand. We have also looked at numerous TV ads, two campaigns and printed ads.

Btw thanks to presenters for their great looking printed portfolio :)

Jos and Martin had a great session about what a great billboard/print ad is. How visual is more important than copy and how best ads don’t even have copy!

Here are some examples of ads they had shown.

We are still working on the billboard of Eurofest – European film festival in Kinoteka. Now I have drawn approx. 40 ideas and there seems to be one really good one.

Kalidays – the international copywriting festival began approx 12 hours ago and we already had numerous brainstorming sessions with lots of creative ideas – I can’t say they are original *as almost every time we can say that somebody has done it before* but juices are flowing in various directions.

During the first day I was the most impressed with Martin Mol and Jos van Der Lee. Their overview of Slovenian billboards was not only amusing but also eye-opening. Among the best were ITAK Mobitel 4YEO, Lisca Cheek, and HM (because of great art direction) for most of the other billboards their comment was in the style of OMG.

Then the creating brief of Kinoteka’s european film festival in January was presented. It’s about creating copy and design for billboard which should promote this festival where top 100 films from all European countries will be shown. Target group are students, intellectuals and general public. We will see what comes out of this and btw the main prize is free entrance to Kinoteka till the end of this student year / Let’s try to win this one!

The second lecture/brainstorming session I have attended was No copy (no) advertising by Igor Poturić. This one was about alternative/low budget adveritising/media and how the creative ideas can be implemented in an non-traditional way.

We will see what the second day will be like…

Watch and vote for this short ad for plasma TV from Gorenje :)

It was done in Adobe Premiere Pro in approx. 5 hours. The main idea took me much more time.

For those of us who were not able to visit this great event (5.-8. November 2007) there are some pictures and presentations already available.

Presentations at SlideShare
Pictures at flickr.com
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin web site

If you use Mozilla Forefox on a regular basis and you are also an avid user of flickr, facebook, youtube and other nice web services try the new Flock – The Social Web Browser.

The migration of data (bookmarks, feeds, usernames) is quite easy so in less than 15 minutes you’ll get a set of new tools that will make your online life easier.