Photo credit: Žiga Intihar
October brought us another edition of Golden Drum, and after Portorož, I was left with a few seemingly unrelated things: nostalgia for a time we never lived through, sketches that are not yet ready to be shown, and a birthday greeting for a robot. Listed like this, they make it hard to explain that I was at a creative industry festival. And yet, they explain rather well why I love being there.
Katrina Stirton Dodd, trends editor at Contagious, opened the talks programme with a discussion of content overload, nostalgia and loneliness. The Contagious Radar 2026 report links nostalgia to the need for security and social connection, with examples including adults buying toys and redecorating their rooms to resemble those of their childhood.
The finding that 37 per cent of Gen Z feel nostalgic for the nineties, even though many never lived through that period, raises an interesting question: do we long for the past, or for what we believe it offered? A slower pace, less pressure, easier connections? For an industry that puts so much energy into predicting the future, it is useful to understand why some audiences want to go back. Retro aesthetics are easy to adopt. Understanding the need that gives them their power is far more demanding.
Later, Benjamin Simon and Dirk Schuster, founders of FOREAL, brought the conversation back to pen and paper. Their studio operates from Trier, an old German city that appears on our mental map of the creative industry less often than Berlin. From Trier, they work for international clients, reminding us just how narrow our habit of associating creativity with a handful of major addresses really is.
In their talk, A Pen and a Stupid Idea, they showed how rough sketches can open the way to experiments and unexpected solutions. For people who create complex digital visuals, something scribbled on paper can still be a perfectly natural starting point.
We are an industry that is always looking for more. A new tool, a new channel, a new way to make or show something. There is plenty of curiosity in that, but also some anxiety: by the time we master one thing, we are already supposed to understand the next. That is why I enjoyed watching people whose work depends on technology leave room for an idea that does not yet look good. That initial drawing you might hide if someone looked over your shoulder too soon.
Sometimes, before opening our laptops, we really do need a pen, some paper and a little patience with our own stupid idea.
Immediately after them, Carl Ewald Jannerfeldt spoke about bringing creative ideas into the product development department, a place where they are often met with the familiar “we’re not touching the product”. Yet the product itself can open up an opportunity for communication that no additional ad could replace.
In his work for Husqvarna, robotic lawnmowers were given the ability to sing a birthday greeting to the Curiosity rover on Mars. The Happy Birthday from Earth campaign, created by Prime Weber Shandwick, connected a thoroughly earthly product with a robot on another planet, using a software update to let the lawnmowers symbolically wish it a happy birthday.
I try to imagine the moment when someone first suggested that lawnmowers should sing to a robot on Mars. An idea like that is probably easier to dismiss than to develop. That is precisely why I am glad there are people who stick with it long enough to get the engineers involved too. Among all the possible ways for a manufacturer to demonstrate its technology, someone chose a birthday song.
After talks like those, the evening awards ceremony becomes a chance to see how many other people have managed to push through something that may have sounded unusual in the first meeting.
Here is one possibly unpopular opinion: I like watching case studies at awards ceremonies. The ones that make the ceremony run longer and turn leaving for the party into a matter of quiet negotiations between the rows. I understand all the objections. Still, the next campaign on the screen regularly wins me over again.
Part of it is an occupational hazard. When you write about this industry every day, you want to know how someone got from a problem to a solution, what they noticed, where they decided to take a different turn. But there is also something much less analytical about it. A good case study gives me goosebumps. And once again, I feel proud to be part of an industry that, for all its complications, still revolves around one axis: human creativity.
If only you could see how much of it we have.
In no particular order, I want to mention a few moments from this year’s Golden Drum awards ceremony:
The Finnish campaign The Banned Collection, by hasan & partners for Naisten Linja, an organisation supporting women facing violence. When advertising restrictions on Meta and Microsoft platforms blocked their messages as political content, those same messages ended up on T-shirts and other clothing. Unlike the messages they carried, the clothes could be advertised. So a space for selling products became a route to an audience the organisation could no longer address directly.
I particularly love ideas that can be explained in a few sentences and then leave you thinking for a long time about the problem they have exposed. Here, that problem is almost uncomfortably clear: a platform can reject a message supporting women, but put it on a product and it gets through. The creatives spotted a crack in the rules and used it to get through what needed to reach people.
Then, the young creatives. Ilona Zdravkova and Neli Kirova from HUMAN in Sofia won the Young Drummers competition with their posters Travel Like a Tourist. Pay Like a Local. I am glad the same evening also makes room for people whose names we have yet to get used to hearing. It makes sense for a festival celebrating creativity to take seriously the moment when someone is only just beginning to build their own place within it.
Our agencies, of course. As someone who works for a regional portal, a special part of the evening belongs to those moments when I recognise our names. McCann Skopje took home the title of Adriatic Agency of the Year, while Studio Sonda, Imago Ogilvy, Three Lions and McCann Beograd also brought awards back to the region.
For me, that is the most concrete reason to talk about the quality of our region. In Portorož, our work is viewed alongside work by agencies from other European countries, before the same juries and in the same categories. That is where regional pride gains a very tangible foundation. Congratulations to everyone who gave us that this year.
And The Pub That Refused to Die. I remember when I first wrote about that campaign and already felt I was sharing something big. Heineken, LePub Milan and Publicis Dublin connected the story of a pub’s survival with an opportunity for the local community to take ownership of it. In June, the campaign also won the Grand Prix in Creative Strategy at Cannes Lions 2026.
It is easy to recognise much more in the story of a pub than a place to order a drink. It is a place where people have their own chairs, familiar faces and a reason to leave the house. After the morning’s discussion of loneliness and the need for connection, a case study like that stays with you even after the campaign results appear on screen.
Finally, I keep coming back to Mihnea Gheorghiu, who was inducted into the Golden Drum Hall of Fame this year. From his speech, I took away a thought about the satisfaction of creating something that did not exist a moment ago. About an idea that gets so firmly into your head that you want to bring it to life, even when you do not yet have permission, validation or any guarantee that it will end with an award.
We recognise both rebellion and a considerable dose of hedonism in that. The pleasure of coming up with something good and then finding that nothing can quite put you off trying to make it happen. We do this because we can hardly imagine anything else we would rather do. And we have to keep feeding the creative within us if we want that feeling to last.
This year, Golden Drum was a buffet for us creatives. I clearly went back for more several times.
Thank you to SOZ and the entire team behind Golden Drum. Next time, it’s our treat.
