How Ukraine's Creative Industry Took Shape

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. 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. 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. “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. “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.

Ukraine

The Origin Story of Ukraine's Creative Industry

How the nation's advertising and communications scene has been evolving over the past decade

Serhii Malyk

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Serhii Malyk