How can a brand win the audience’s attention in the world of beauty, whether its budget is large or limited? Ana Milićević will share concrete insights and examples of good practice in capturing attention, and show how attention is tracked, measured and evaluated in practice.
The consumer journey is no longer a tidy funnel. In an AI-shaped world, people move freely between search, brand messaging and community conversations – looking for the human perspective that helps them discover what’s possible, validate what they’ve heard and decide with confidence. Andre Joel will explain why conversations have become a critical layer of influence and what that means for brands: how to show up earlier, offer proof instead of polish, and earn relevance exactly where consumers ask questions, compare experiences and make choices.
Andre Joel is Head of Sales Partnerships for EMEA at Reddit, where he helps brands connect with communities through authentic, high-intent conversations. With more than 15 years in sales and digital marketing – including roles at Google and Snap – he brings deep expertise in building partnerships and driving growth across international markets.
Bots are fast replacing humans as publishers’ number one visitor. TollBit has been working with HUDI to collect bot traffic data from Croatia’s leading publishers, and Birger Søiland will walk through what that data reveals – and what publishers can do to start monetising this new kind of audience.
Birger Søiland has spent close to two decades serving the media industry from both sides of the publisher’s table. He began his career in publishing, including as MD Norway at Nordiske Medier, and spent the following decade building and selling the technology newsrooms depend on: he led EMEA sales for a publisher data and personalisation platform and, at Norkon, helped bring Live Center (the live-news product since acquired by Norway’s NTB) to newsrooms around the world. He has worked with publishers including The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Axel Springer. Today he leads global publisher partnerships at TollBit, which gives around 9,500 publishers the infrastructure to monitor, manage and monetise AI systems using their content. He also speaks and writes about the economics of AI content licensing and web scraping.
What happens when you stop trying to make content that will ‘perform’ and start making what genuinely interests you? Using Spomenar – a project that grew from a small personal experiment into content with a reach of millions – as his example, Filip Filković Philatz will talk about nostalgia, algorithms and AI, and the lessons he has learned trying to understand what actually holds people’s attention today.
Filip Filković Philatz is a director, producer and author working at the intersection of film, television, advertising and new technologies. He created and directed the long-running documentary series Dulum zemlje and the documentary K67, dedicated to the iconic Yugoslav kiosk and its design and cultural legacy. He has directed numerous documentary and TV projects, commercials and music videos, and in recent years has been exploring the use of AI in film and creative production. He is also the creator of Spomenar, a digital archive of everyday life in the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s that reconstructs collective memory and nostalgia through short film fragments, and which has reached millions on social media.
Everyone wants our attention, and platforms know exactly how to take it. Hegel noticed a useful rule: lose a few hairs and nothing happens; keep losing them and one day you’re bald. Add more of one element, step by step, and at a certain threshold the effect changes in kind. Attention works the same way – it sounds like nonsense, yet the logic holds. Ignazio Morello will share the method he uses to choose which kind of attention to build, with a small example from his work at Verne.
Ignazio Morello is an Italian creative and Chief Marketing Officer at Verne, the company behind Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service, where he leads brand and marketing. With more than 20 years of international experience, including as Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi, he has worked with global brands in the automotive and energy sectors. He believes stories are humanity’s oldest technology. Then someone invented PowerPoint and ruined everything.
What happens when new-school marketing meets old-school publishing? Iva Prpić will show how Presshaus built a fully digital sales engine around the book, a classic old-school product, connecting content, data, news portals, social media, influencers, newsletters, magazines and events.
Iva Prpić holds a master’s degree in journalism and specialised in public relations at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, building her career across sports journalism, digital marketing and client management. She started out at Sportske novosti before moving to the digital agency envy Croatia, where, first as Social Media Manager and then as Account Manager, she led digital campaigns, client relationships and project teams. Today she is Marketing Manager at Presshaus, where she shapes and delivers the marketing strategy of the publishing and media house: developing B2C communication and campaigns across channels and formats, coordinating internal teams and external partners, and working on brand development, promotion of titles and subscriptions, events and other marketing projects.
Ivan Ivanković can’t code, yet in the last 12 months he has built more than 25 tools. Each one started with something that annoyed him: an app that tracks water quality in Zagreb and Split, an analysis of 1.6 million tourist reviews that filled the headlines all summer, an autonomous news portal that got him legal threats from publishers, and a customer support automation that tells him every morning how many queries have already been answered and which ones are waiting for him. Using these examples, he will show what the path from frustration to a working tool looks like today: you describe what you want to get, and AI works out how. You’ll leave with an idea for a first tool you can build yourself, or a process you can hand over to AI.
Ivan Ivanković is the founder of Vibe Coding Academy. Before that, he co-founded Fonoa, which automates taxes for global digital platforms, and earlier still he ran Uber’s operations in the region. He can’t code, yet in the past year he has built more than 25 tools, from an analysis of 1.6 million tourist reviews that filled the headlines all summer to an autonomous AI news portal. At Vibe Coding Academy workshops, more than 250 people with no programming background have so far learned to use AI to turn their own work frustrations into tools that actually work.
Where does TV fit into a world that never stops scrolling? As content keeps moving to mobile devices and digital platforms, television remains an important part of the media ecosystem. Ivan Ljubičić will present data and examples that reveal how viewing habits are changing and what TV advertising delivers for audiences and advertisers today.
Ivan Ljubičić has worked in the media industry for more than 15 years and has developed the projects and brands Pickbox NOW, Pickbox 1, Pickbox 2, NEM Dubrovnik, NEM Zagreb, Mediatranslations and Mediavision from the very start – businesses he is responsible for today. He focuses in particular on new business models, strategic partnerships, digital transformation and marketing. He is a proud father of two.
How do you respond when someone is belittling you and backing you into a corner? Ivana Glavina Jelaš will present a communication technique used by police negotiators that has proven highly effective in uncomfortable, stressful and crisis situations, in both private and professional settings.
Ivana Glavina Jelaš is a psychologist, scientist and a leading expert in police psychology in Croatia, with twenty years of experience in education and research and ten years in treatment work. She is a university professor and the author of numerous scientific and professional publications. As a long-time psychologist to police negotiators, she has developed unique crisis communication skills, which she now adapts and passes on to other professions.
How do you direct a format that has no clear template yet? The vibe coding show combined a tech experiment, a competition, reality-TV dramaturgy and content for digital platforms into a hybrid format that still had to be defined – all for the toughest, most je-ne-sais-quoi audience out there: Gen Z. Katarina Bogdanović Kukla will talk about how the format came together and how you direct something for which there are no rules yet.
Katarina Bogdanović Kukla is a director who, across film, advertising and music videos, has developed a distinctive authorial voice that combines strong visual aesthetics, contemporary storytelling and dream logic. Her work explores Slavic heritage and plays with the boundaries between the real and the fantastical. Her music videos have racked up more than 100 million views on YouTube, and her short film Sisters (Sestre) won the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand festival in 2021. Her feature debut Fantasy premiered in Locarno in 2025, went on to screen at numerous international festivals and won several awards, including the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Actress, as well as the main award and the Cineuropa Award at the Trieste Film Festival.
Algorithms keep getting better at showing us exactly what we like – but the result is often a feed where more and more content looks the same. Through concrete examples of brands that managed to break that predictability, Katarina Exle will show how to find the unexpected without it turning random, and how a creative idea can break out of the patterns that audiences, categories and platforms already know by heart.
Katarina Exle is a wannabe wine connoisseur with too much screen time and a champion of lifelong learning and everything equality brings. In a past life she was a journalist and radio host before stepping into advertising, where she plans to stay. With more than 10 years in the agency world, she has worked on campaigns for brands such as Nestlé, IKEA, Molson Coors and Kaufland, picking up a respectable collection of awards along the way. Today she is Client Service Director and Head of Digital at the creative agency Cvoke, balancing clients, creative and campaigns that actually work. She also teaches at Algebra University, where she tries to explain advertising to students in a concrete, simple and – whenever possible – fun way.
The internet is constantly awash with cute, silly and clumsy content that hijacks our attention and makes the world feel adorable, wobbly and hyper-interesting – in that ‘I’ll forget this in two seconds’ kind of way. Through its programme CUTE BUT PSYCHO, the curatorial collective KUĆĆA explores these seemingly superfluous intensities: how platform aesthetics work as both a trap and a weapon, and how vulnerability can become a form of resistance. Through a presentation of artistic practices, Klara Petrović and Luja Šimunović will show what cuteness hides – and at what cost.
Klara Petrović and Luja Šimunović, together with Jurica Mlinarec, run KUĆĆA – a curatorial collective and project space in Zagreb, founded in 2021 as a platform for experimenting with alternative ways of producing knowledge and new ways of feeling, thinking and being. KUĆĆA works as a collaborative space for artists, curators, theorists and other individuals and organisations working in process-oriented, experimental and research-based artistic practices.
The first attention crisis didn’t start with TikTok – it started with papyrus, and Seneca’s 2,000-year-old advice now comes with data. A glance at a post in the feed lasts about two seconds; a page view on a Croatian news portal, around sixty. On a deduplicated basis, local publishers reach more people than Facebook, and the generation that lives on social media trusts news from publishers’ newsrooms the most. Matej Sever will talk about the real value of an impression on social media and on local news portals and why audience trust matters, explaining where attention turns into impact and how to use those insights cost-effectively in media planning.
Matej Sever heads the Centre for Social and Market Research at Algebra Bernays University and leads HUDI’s working group on standardising news portal audience measurement, where he coordinates DotMetrics – Croatia’s official online audience measurement. He started his career at Ipsos, where he spent eight years on projects across a wide range of topics, most recently as Head of Media Research.
Who really decides what we see on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube – us or the algorithms? And how are EU digital rules changing the game, not just for tech giants but for smaller digital platforms and everyone who lives online every day? In conversation, Milana Brkić and Hana Bartolović will unpack what the Digital Services Act (DSA) means for us, how much control we actually have over our digital experience, and how the EU is working to build a safer, more transparent and fairer digital space.
Milana Brkić is the Digital Services Act (DSA) officer at the European Commission Representation in Croatia, where, in cooperation with the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT), she is involved in implementing and monitoring the application of the DSA. Her work focuses on the accountability of digital platforms, algorithmic transparency, user protection and creating a safer digital environment, with a particular emphasis on social media and its impact on everyday life.
Hana Bartolović is an entrepreneur and the founder and editor-in-chief of the After5 portal. She launched her own media brand in 2022, after years of working in digital media, with the aim of creating a medium that understands the ambitions, interests and everyday lives of people on both sides of working hours.
What really sits behind the biggest pirate streaming services? A criminal ecosystem that has very little to do with sport. Data from one offshore hosting network makes the point: live sport accounted for 5% of traffic, phishing for 44%. The stream is just the bait – malware, personal-data theft and fraud come bundled with it, and viewers’ own internet connections are quietly enrolled into networks that are then sold on to other criminals. In 2025, 31.2 million Europeans used illicit IPTV services (up 82.5% since 2021), at an estimated cost of €4.32 billion, and 27% of 15–24-year-olds watched sport from illegal sources. Miruna Herovanu will explain how AI is accelerating both sides of the problem: helping operations redeploy within minutes of a takedown, making phishing dramatically more effective and turning these networks into a ready-made channel for disinformation.
Miruna Herovanu is Executive Director of the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), which represents leading broadcasters, sports leagues and technology providers across Europe and beyond. She leads AAPA’s engagement with EU institutions, regulators and enforcement bodies, focusing on the infrastructure and business models that enable large-scale audiovisual piracy. Her work centres on practical, enforceable solutions to live and on-demand content theft.
Discrimination isn’t exactly the topic people come to unwind with – and yet Seksizam naš svagdašnji (Our Everyday Sexism) is now followed by tens of thousands of people, with content that racks up almost three million views a month. Nataša Vajagić will talk about what happens when you keep pointing out things people may never have noticed before – and how much social media content can shape what we consider acceptable tomorrow, and what we’ll no longer tolerate.
Nataša Vajagić holds a master’s degree in journalism and is a feminist and activist who has spent 15 years at the Centre for Civic Initiatives Poreč, working on women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights and on combating discrimination and gender-based violence. She runs Seksizam naš svagdašnji (Our Everyday Sexism) and, through the NO SH/T network, monitors and calls out sexism, homophobia and transphobia in the media and public space, researches their impact on society and advocates for more responsible media reporting.
Why do strong ideas so often fail to make it to execution? Drawing on more than 15 years on the client side at Heineken, Molson Coors and Carlsberg, writing and approving briefs, Peđa Rađenović will explain from the client’s perspective where and why good ideas get stuck inside organisations. He will also talk about how the gap between the physical and digital worlds makes agencies the only ones who can see the entire customer journey, and what really keeps clients renewing.
Peđa Rađenović, MBA, is a brand strategist specialising in CPG and beverages. He spent more than 15 years in senior commercial and marketing roles at Heineken, Molson Coors and Carlsberg across more than 20 markets – on the client side of the table, writing and approving the very briefs his talk is about. Today he is the founder of WTNV, a brand strategy consultancy working across North America and Europe. He studied behavioural economics at the Rotman School of Management and serves as VP International Business at AMA Toronto.
When we asked Petar Pavić for a talk description, he sent us 79 terms in alphabetical order, from “ai” to “žurnalizam”. We left them exactly as they are – we couldn’t have summed up today’s media any better ourselves: Google and TikTok, paywalls and Galácticos, clickbait and credibility, all in one place. How it all fits into one story, Petar will reveal on stage. Until then, here’s the official description of his talk “Medij” (The Medium):
ai · algoritam · aplikacija · attention · audience · autor · blog · blogger · brand · broj članaka · chatbot · clickbait · community · content · creator · credibility · data · digital · Discover · distribucija · editor · ekosustav · engagement · Facebook · feed · follower · format · Galácticos · gatekeeper · Google · grupa · impresije · influencer · Instagram · interakcija · korisnik · kreator · medij · mobile · monetizacija · multiformat · multiplatform · native · newsletter · novinar · oglašivač · organic reach · paywall · platforma · podcast · popularnost · portal · pretplata · publika · publisher · reach · redakcija · reputacija · sadržaj · scroll · SEO · short-form · storytelling · streaming · subscribers · talent · Telegram · TikTok · traffic · trust · urednik · UX · video · vijest · viral · vjerodostojnost · web · YouTube · žurnalizam
Petar Pavić is a digital media and marketing expert and co-founder of S.T.A.R. Digital Group, a leading regional digital marketing and ad-tech company. He also works as a strategic consultant for digital operations with a leading marketing agency in the region. He has led digital transformation and marketing strategy projects for clients across a range of industries in Southeast Europe, with a focus on digital marketing in an international context. He has received numerous national and international awards in digital media, design and communications.
Tony Stark was a genius even without the suit – the suit just gave him superpowers. That’s exactly how Stipe Grubišić sees AI in journalism: not as something that will replace journalists, but as a tool that can help them work faster, dig deeper and tell better stories. He will talk about what AI for journalists should actually look like and what we can already do today.
Stipe Grubišić is a media professional with more than 20 years of experience in digital transformation, content strategy and developing commercial models across the region. He has worked on both sides of the border – in Croatia and Slovenia – which gives him a unique perspective on the differences in pace, approach and mindset between the two markets. He currently leads key projects at Dnevnik Mediji, including the premium content brand DNVK, the business platform Zlata nit, new advertising and analytics solutions, and digital newsroom processes. He is known for tying content, sales and technology together into a meaningful whole – and for the line “Let’s just put it out there and fix it as we go” (or, when he’s in Slovenia, “First, let’s get it aligned”). When he isn’t writing 60-slide decks for 20-minute slots, he drinks coffee, reads briefs and tries to get everything done by midnight.
The island is small. The stories aren’t. Behind every GoLošinj video – the ones where Tihana, in a black suit and with a perfectly straight face, dives headfirst into the sea – there’s something the camera doesn’t show: neighbours daring to step in front of the lens for the first time, nerves before hitting publish, and the moment you realise people on the other side of the world are crying with laughter over your waterfront. Tihana Dakić-Barichievich will tell how the idea grew out of private sketches and the persistence of one stubborn friend, and what it’s like to film in the middle of the tourist season. She’ll also reveal what happens when strangers start recognising you and your neighbours start bringing you ideas for the next video.
Tihana Dakić-Barichievich comes from Veli Lošinj and has worked in tourism for 33 years. She is the creator of GoLošinj, a project that tells the island’s story differently: instead of postcards and classic tourist shots, she focuses on people, their characters and everyday moments that can’t be faked. She combines video, storytelling and humour, usually with a completely straight face, and her videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views and bring people to the island. This October, the Town and Tourist Board of Mali Lošinj recognised her for her long-standing promotion of the Lošinj archipelago. She believes a destination isn’t made only of places, but of the people we meet there – because places can be forgotten, but people are remembered.
How much are conversions really worth when you only look at the short term? In a digital world focused on instant results, that approach often leads to poor business decisions and undervalues the real contribution of channels like social media. Using concrete examples, Tin Klasić will explain why customer lifetime value (LTV) belongs at the centre of attention, how to avoid misreading results in multichannel marketing, and why decisions driven purely by short-term goals hurt brands in the long run.
Tin Klasić started his digital marketing career after graduating from the Faculty of Economics, specialising in Google and Meta advertising in an agency setting. He built his experience across a range of digital projects, including a stint at Styria and work on Abrakadabra, one of the region’s most ambitious e-commerce projects, and sharpened his social advertising expertise at Httpool (now Aleph). Today he runs marketing strategy at Super for a global brand in a highly demanding, regulated market. When he’s not focused on campaigns, you’ll find him with his family, on his bike or with a guitar in hand. Fair warning: invite him for coffee and you’re in for a passionate lecture on specialty coffee and why good coffee has to be acidic.
