4 nights spent in Portorož, overlooking the salt farms in the bay;

4 R+B works that ended up in the finals, the best performance of a Romanian independent agency this year;

4 R+B team members eager to feed on everything that’s fresh in advertising;

4 donut-sized wheels on the minuscule Fiat Panda that carried them around.

It would seem that four was the mystical number tying together Rusu+Borțun’s 2018 Golden Drum experience. Well, except for the eight hard nipples poking out of their clothes after swimming in the Adriatic or the countless glasses of wine.

But it was not all fun and games for Catalin, Marc, Miruna, and Marius during the 25th edition of the festival. It was also an inspiration-learning-networking-hope cocktail, with a tiny drop of bitterness, just enough to fuel their desire to create meaningful, impacting work and grab some trophies next year. It also proved to be the ideal setup for an impromptu workshop that took further the agency’s strategy to redefine its working model and adopt an even more dynamic approach, driven by multi-talented “hybrid” people. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

In terms of talks and presentations, the three days of festival provided a ride through the entire reaction gamut, from “how come I’ve missed this campaign?” to “I’ve seen this TVC/case-study a hundred times but it’s still cool” to “damn, I wish we had done that…” to ”f*ck you and your million dollar budget!” to “OMG, there’s John Hegarty!” to “who do they think they’re fooling?” to the obvious “I can’t believe that won and ours didn’t!”.

Josephine Richards (Creative Director, INGO Stockholm) showcased some of the cool things they’ve done for Lidl in Sweden and demonstrated that challenging the client brief and coming up with an entirely different communication approach can be the only way to attain that desired perception shift.

Justin Billingsley managed to change what could have been another boring presentation on the data + creativity marriage by showing how smoothly Publicis Emil blends consumer information with ad creation and delivery for Mercedes-Benz. And he did it without any shoes on.

To top things off, Evgeny Primachenko awed everyone with the amazing work W+K Amsterdam does for Nike in Russia.

Add a trip down memory lane with some Levi’s vintage ads presented by the very man who created them (ahem, Sir John Hegarty) and you get the four R+B members’ personal picks for the highlights of Golden Drum 2018.

Over and out.