Festival Programme

Start your morning with fresh coffee, laid-back music, and friendly faces. A casual space to connect, ease into the day, and enjoy the atmosphere before the sessions begin.

Festival officially kicks off as Orkhan Karim takes the stage for a short welcome speech. A brief moment to set the tone and open the doors to two days full of inspiration, creativity, and connection.

The session argues that while the world turns more and more toward AI, soft skills like decision-making and taste will become paradoxically more central, bringing the edge that will keep great communication human and impactful.

Questions this session will answer:

• Which human skills will matter most in the AI era?
• Why will taste and judgment become more important?
• What keeps communication human and impactful?

This talk looks at sustainable creativity in a simple, practical way. Not as a trend, but as a way of working. How do you create ideas that don’t fade after one campaign. How do you build a culture where creativity keeps showing up, again and again.

Through real experiences from agency life, it explores how curiosity can be kept alive, how bold thinking can feel safe, and how teams can stay creatively sharp over time. In an industry obsessed with what’s new, this is about what lasts. A mindset that helps people not just create, but keep creating

Moderator: Fərid Pərdəşünas

Panelists:
Azer Aydemir
Miri Yusif
Sona Abbasova

This session reflects an honest thought: compared to life-saving or socially critical jobs, marketing can feel pointless. At the same time, this is where the contradiction appears, marketing is deeply embedded in pop culture. It shapes trends, influences desires, creates symbols, and affects how people see the world. Even if it is not essential, it is everywhere.

Ana will share how she started her career in stop motion animation in Georgia. How she established her own studio, built her team from zero and turned her craft into a business while also creating her personal artistic projects. Ana will talk about her experience of building relationships with international residencies and studios and how she manages to do what she loves and also make a living.

I will share my point of view on how Gen AI changes the rules of the content creation game and how brands can leverage these innovations to boost both the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns including work produced by my team.

The world don't need more data, algorithms and KPI's, it needs effectiveness built on empathy rather than time and money. Or just more brandy.

Good advertising craft once required campaigns to be integrated. Today the reverse is true. Campaigns need to be DISINTEGRATED. The change is made possible and necessary by the nature and capabilities of AI-powered media that offer intimacy and immediacy. This captures the essence of advertising on social media. This short presentation will be devoted to ways for making campaigns diverse, but never "all over the place".

This session explores a growing paradox in modern creativity: as technology advances, audiences respond stronger to authenticity, emotion, and shared human experience.

What does it take to create a campaign that becomes the most successful in a country and is talked about around the world?
At a time when the industry is investing in AI, data, and increasingly complex solutions, what if the real breakthrough still comes from something much simpler?

I will share the story of a campaign we launched just two months ago built purely on human emotion. The campaign became the most successful PR campaign ever made in the country, resonated far beyond borders and became known around the world.

Why do the most effective campaigns today feel less like advertising and more like something real? Why do ideas rooted in empathy travel further than those driven by innovation alone?

Through this lens, we will explore how creativity is shifting - from capturing attention to creating meaning, from delivering messages to building connection.

Why most advertising is skipped and what actually cuts through.

What happens when creativity is no longer a human monopoly? This talk explores synthetic creators: autonomous, evolving systems that originate ideas, not just assist in making them

For more than a decade, brands have tried to save the world. Purpose. Sustainability. ESG. Big promises everywhere. And yet - people don’t feel it. Trust is down. Creativity is predictable. Impact is questionable.
So what went wrong?
In this provocative keynote, Thomas Kolster -one of the pioneers behind the Goodvertising movement and author of The Hero Trap -takes the audience on a journey from the rise of purpose-led marketing to its current breaking point.
The uncomfortable truth: Brands became the hero of the story. And people were left out.Drawing on two decades of experience and insights from the world’s most effective campaigns, Thomas introduces a new model for creativity and brand building - one that shifts the focus from what brands believe to what people actually need.
Because the brands that win today don’t try to impress. They help people become something better. This session is a call to rewire creativity - away from empty storytelling and towards work that creates real, tangible change in people’s lives.

AI is transforming marketing, but on TikTok, creativity remains the engine of performance. Automation now helps brands test ideas faster, optimize campaigns, and connect content with the right communities at scale. The result is a shift in the role of marketers: from managing campaigns to designing creative systems that continuously learn and evolve. This keynote explores how TikTok uses AI to amplify creativity, enable smarter advertising, and build automation that works responsibly for brands and communities.