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UKRAINE


THE ORIGIN STORY OF UKRAINE'S CREATIVE INDUSTRY


HOW THE NATION'S ADVERTISING AND COMMUNICATIONS SCENE HAS BEEN EVOLVING OVER THE
PAST DECADE

Ukraine's creative market started forming soon after independence in 1991.Anton
Abo
By Serhii Malyk

2 days ago

The following article is from Adweek’s special issue “On Ukraine, by
Ukrainians,” published April 25, 2022, and created entirely by Ukrainian
writers, editors and artists amid the ongoing all-out war in their homeland.

Aug. 24, 1991. The Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
declared the independence of Ukraine. After the soviet dictatorship, Ukraine—an
Eastern European country—renewed its independence. It kept going its own way,
and its creative market started to form as well.

Over the next decade, Ukrainians mastered the new profession. The first
copywriters were ex-journalists, teachers and engineers, and the first clients
were foreign companies. The Advertising Law was adopted in 1996, and the
Ukrainian Advertising Coalition was created the following year. Global ad
networks opened their offices, and ex-pats became the first creative directors,
bringing the Western vision.



What happened in late 2013 and early 2014 was a wake-up call for authentic
Ukrainian creativity. 

Anton Abo

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians—holding first banners, then Molotov
cocktails—headed to Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv to protect their freedoms of
being who they are, speaking the way they want and thinking the way they want.
They knew that the truth was on their side. It became the Revolution of Dignity.

“The fighting for the liberty of being yourself is in our historical memory; it
is our way of living,” says Anya Goncharova, the founder of creative agency
DramaQueen who showed the Ukrainian market how sensual manifestos could be. She
believes that the revolution revived the love for local manufacturers. 



Her point is backed with figures. In 2016, in the very heart of Kyiv, the
world’s biggest store of Ukrainian labels, Vsi. Svoi, opened, featuring products
from more than 250 local brands. Headlines like “30 New Restaurants in Kyiv” or
“10 Bars That Opened in Lviv This November” constantly popped up in online city
digests. 

> Talented copywriters and art directors left larger local and global network
> agencies to establish their own creative teams.

The development of small businesses, fashion brands—including Sleeper, Zhilyova
and Riot Division—and startups like Petcube, BetterMe and Reface has paved the
way for the rapid growth of the Ukrainian communication industry. The more
entrepreneurs learned about branding, marketing, and creative solutions, the
more new agencies emerged. Talented copywriters and art directors left larger
local and global network agencies to establish their own creative teams.

Shortly before 2014, new ad market players—Banda, Aimbulance, [isdgroup],
Fedoriv and Arriba!—were on the same line with Ukrainian offices of BBDO,
Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett. Even more new teams—such as Iamidea,
ANGRY, DramaQueen, Bickerstaff.284, Shots, Taktika and Patsany—joined in soon.



Continue reading

Parking Spaces for Ticket Lovers Client: Ukrainian Patrol Police Agency: ANGRY
Year: 2020

A list of effective campaigns for small- to mid-sized companies and nonprofits
made the independent teams trustful partners for large-scale businesses as well.
It’s now quite common for a young agency to work with a national retailer or
even with the government.

The market got more creative campaigns with alternative media, which is another
positive shift in communications. The traditional above-the-line work is now
infused with non-standards.

One example is the pop-up restaurant Uncounted Since 1932, opened in Tel Aviv
and Brussels in 2017 by the Ukrainian Leadership Academy in collaboration with
the Gres Todorchuk PR and communication agency. The aim was to spread awareness
about the Holodomor, the terror famine arranged by the Soviets to kill millions
of Ukrainians. The Uncounted Since 1932 menu featured only three meals made of
pine cones, tree bark, and ground grass—the food Ukrainians had to eat during
Holodomor. This powerful initiative received three Effie Awards.



The other example is an initiative for the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, which in
2017 won Ukraine’s first Cannes Lion, a bronze, for a musical performance
devoted to the anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy, the massacre of the Jewish
people by the Nazis. In 2020, the Banda creative agency became the most
effective independent creative agency in the Effie Index Global ranking.

In 2020, to promote the importance of parking regulations, the ANGRY creative
agency partnered with the patrol police to put an ironic mark, “Parking Spaces
for Ticket Lovers,” on 100 illegal parking spots across Kyiv’s center area. The
campaign won ADC*Europe Silver. 

Uncounted Since 1932 Client: Ukrainian Leadership Academy Agency: Gres Todorchuk
Year: 2017

In 2022, the Bickerstaff.783 creative agency teamed up with the Laska charity
store to create a project to change how brands produce their wearable merch.
They made merch items from used clothes that have already lived their lives
before becoming part of someone’s corporate culture.



Viktor Ishkov, the regional CEO of BBDO Ukraine & Central Asia, recollects that
prior to 2014, the Ukrainian creative market was like a child. 

Continue reading

“A child has no resources of its own to survive, so it cannot be independent.
Similar to that, our market turned to experienced creatives from the West or
russia, relying on their expertise,” he says. “We lived on others’ narratives
and didn’t look deeper into ourselves.”

Before 2014, the Ukrainian market focused on how to provide for itself. And
later, it set to exploring its identity.

Over the past eight years, the Ukrainian market has been like any teenager—full
of hesitations, endless experiments, rebellion and extremes. “We didn’t want to
copy Western agencies’ approaches anymore. Hundreds of creative people just
wanted to do their thing,” says ex-brand leader of Fedoriv marketing agency
Oleksii Maksymenko, who worked both in smaller independent agencies and in
branches of global ad networks.

Of course, newly launched creative schools also contributed to a cool image of
the industry among the younger generation, becoming the platform where aspiring
creatives could reach out to both experienced Ukrainian advertisers and
professionals from abroad.

Laska Client: Laska Agency: Bickerstaff Year: 2022

“One of the specific features of our market is that our universities have never
offered a well-grounded education in communications,” says Goncharova. “It’s
sometimes challenging, but still we go on experimenting, searching for new ways
of self-expression, trying to find our creative language.” 

Like any teen, the Ukrainian creative market first used to ignore what it had,
but now it is accepting it. “The way we feel and present ourselves is well
illustrated by a term ‘humanwise’—without any excesses, all genuine,” says
Maksymenko. Thus, “our gut tells us whether there’s any truth in something. And
this is a precious skill for those who work in communications and reach people’s
hearts.”

As the Soviet Union collapsed, global agencies entered the Central and Eastern
Europe markets. And as noted in the book “Adland: A Global History of
Advertising” by Mark Tungate, they stumbled on the people’s conviction that a
product needed ads only if it was of poor quality or produced massively. 

It was 32 years ago. The people have changed a lot since that. Now, Ukrainians
allow advertising to be part of their daily lives. But only if it’s “humanwise.”
With every new effort, the Ukrainian agencies are getting better and better with
this.

The full-scale war has abruptly pushed the Ukrainian creative market out of the
juvenility phase. Ishkov is sure that this traumatic experience will affect
Ukrainian creativity like the events of 2014 did. Still, many times deeper. As a
result, the Ukrainian market will eventually mature.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Continue reading

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“Hard times create strong men,” says Ishkov, and Goncharova supports this point.
She predicts that after this war, the powerful emotional baggage will help them
create enhanced works (no matter how cynical it might sound). Ukrainian
creativity becomes stronger each day, she says—and in this context, a day counts
for a year. 

Maksymenko is sure that soon anything Ukrainian will become the world’s #1
brand. What makes him so confident is that Ukrainians face any challenge boldly
(they can even stop tanks with their bare hands). It’s always like, “Can we do
this? Absolutely!” And we also have an innate ability to unite.

Examples of this are easy to find. One of them is the fresh anti-war project
Never Again Gallery by the Ukrainian creative community—20 famed Ukrainian
artists and illustrators reinterpreted the WW2 posters as a call the West to
prevent the WW3. But this is just a minor illustration of Ukrainians’ unity. The
larger one is that this fierce war is the people’s war, since not only the
military but every Ukrainian is there to fight for the freedom.

“We have always been brave. The bravest in the world. I am sure of that. Because
who else would do what Ukrainians do? … In fact, this is our brand. This is what
it means to be us. To be Ukrainians. To be brave,” said the President of
Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in one of his daily addresses to “free people of
the free country.” This sounds true not only in the face of this full scale-war
unleashed by russia but also in relation to the whole Ukrainian history,
sovereignty, culture—and creativity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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This story first appeared in the April 25, 2022, special issue of Adweek
magazine, created entirely by Ukrainian writers, editors and artists.


SERHII MALYK

Serhii Malyk is a co-founder and creative director of Kyiv-based ANGRY agency.
He is a self-described ad nerd, specializing in non-standard campaigns.

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