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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
