Several thousands of attendees from the whole region, 600 projects competing for industry awards, 125 speakers and performers, 105 companies, sponsors and friends of the festival, 3 days, 3 halls, 3 parties – and the one and only DK Festival.
Our festival of creativity and communications opened its doors to creative and digital people, communicators, designers and lovers of creativity and market communications on April 20. The festival’s ninth edition is expected to attract a big international communications community over the three days in the Hotel Lone in Rovinj.
The focus of this year’s DK Festival is on the scaling of creativity and technologies that keep impressing and scaring us at the same time, said the festival director Dunja Ivana Ballon.
Apart from the Main Hall, the attendees can join many interesting discussions on topics important for the industry in the other two festival halls, from topics on digital and cryptocurrency to creativity and public relations. National experts will be joined by regional experts which will offer us a high-quality overview of the creative and communications scene. Apart from the program during the day, all three festival evenings will be reserved for award ceremonies.
Anđela Buljan Šiber, HURA and IAB Croatia Chairwoman and a member of the festival’s organizing committee, has revealed: We had great results at competitions this year, and we’ve beat a lot of our old records. We are proud that we had 600 projects entered in five competitions, and 98 members of the jury and competition boards chose the best ones. Competitions show the community’s growth, and, what’s maybe even more important, they give us the opportunity to see what could have been better, and what we are great at, which is a great representation of the direction for further development.
The first day of the festival attracted a lot of people, and the main hall has become the place for interesting conversations, which started with the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, first with his own talk about the implications of thinking about the cataclysmic ending of the world, and later with his conversation with Edward Snowden, who joined us via video link. Snowden gave a talk called Restoring Trust – How To Solve The Next Generation of Privacy & Security Dilemmas. This was followed by Horvat’s incisive questions about privacy, which are crucial for the future of internet and digital communications, followed by the questions posed by the audience.
Until 2013, we thought that the internet is a big dark space, we didn’t understand it as a physical object, that our computers are connected to the central system with a signal that others can also hear. They were collecting data, but they couldn’t connect all the bases, and we now know that everything that can be known, will be known. From the security perspective, the goal is to set limits to institutional power. There will be better privacy laws in the future, and the question of security will be taken seriously only after the consequences of the privacy breach are clear, said Snowden after the audience asked him about the connection between privacy, marketing, and advertising, and what will the future bring us regarding these industries, which made this talk and important opportunity for the viewers to rethink everything they know and critically come to their own conclusions: Hope is what we have – and what we need. We have the power to change, we don’t need the government for that.
After an exciting first day of the festival, on Friday, 21 April, you can expect talks from Media.Monk’s Main Monk from the world’s biggest creative digital production agency Victor Knaap, Munise Can, a strategy expert from Highsnobiety who helps brands find new ways to matter; creative person of the year from faraway Japan Toshihiko Tanabe; one of the world’s leading creative technology futurists Ian Beacraft powered by Hrvatski Telekom; Mischief-Maker/Strategy Virtuoso Rob Campbell; the surrealist directing duo Vallée Duhamel; Rory Sutherland, one of the most original thinkers in the advertising industry and beyond.
Featured image: Emica Elvedji/PIXSELL