Per Pedersen, Grey’s Global Chief Creative Officer, gave a lecture at the Zagreb University

Zagreb’s marketing and design students, as well as numerous people interested in the topic, came to the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb on Wednesday to hear the lecture The Future Belongs to the Rule Breakers. It was held by Per Pedersen, one of the most awarded creatives in the world and the chief creative director of the Grey Group. He was hosted in Zagreb by the Bruketa&Žinić&Grey agency, Grey’s global design and digital hub. Per Pedersen has won more than 500 awards for communications, and this year he was one of the speakers at the Cannes Lions festival of creativity.

At the lecture in Zagreb, he emphasized that creativity and innovation in the near future will make the difference between successful and unsuccessful businesses and products. If you want to reach users or customers, he said, you will have to have an unusually high tolerance to constant changes. He believes that in such an environment the rebels and rule breakers are the ones who thrive. Following rules has never changed anything, he pointed out.

He focused on his own field of market communication. He thinks advertisers and agencies should strive for communication that is legendary efficient, which means creating projects that are relevant to pop culture, as only such communication and related products will be effective and successful. He warned that such projects never come from a position where everyone is comfortable.

He listed several Rules for Breaking the Rules, starting from insisting on excellent work which, Pedersen believes, truly solves real problems. Don’t do ads that look like ads, he said. Among these rules is also the rock star attitude, which refers to a culture that is not a corporate one, but the one where people make effort because they want to, not because they have to.

As an important rule, he also emphasized setting creatives to top positions, in the leadership and decision making processes where all challenges are resolved, because he believes that creatives raise the value of the organization. Among the prominent rules are also the abolition of unnecessary procedures as well as the celebration of failures without fear, the greatest enemy of creativity. Stop telling creatives what to do, and you as well stop doing everything you are told, he concluded.

During the lecture he showed several case studies of the kind of communication we should strive for, like the Life Paint project, spray paint for bikes that glows in the dark, made by Volvo to reduce the number of injured bikers in night traffic. Then the Swedish number that promoted Sweden as a tourist destination by creating a unique phone number which would always be answered by a different citizen of Sweden, with whom you could talk about their country. Another example was PayPhone Bank by Une Telekom in Columbia, which used their old telephone booths to enable thousands of poor citizens who could not afford a bank account to save money using booths and coins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjjhcdcBkK4

Photo: Vanja Babić