White Square International Festival of Creativity continues its call for entries. The final deadline is May 3. Agencies and brands can submit their best projects in 243 nominations covering the whole spectrum of the communications, marketing, branding and creative industries. The entries will be evaluated by six international juries, representatives of more than 45 countries, experienced jury members, winners of numerous awards of prestigious international creativity festivals. We are pleased to continue our series of interviews with the jury members of the White Square Festival 2024. Today with us is the founder of The Alternative School, Teodora Migdalovici, a brand consultant, writer, personal branding coach, public speaker and creativity teacher at The Alternative School, an educational platform for young creatives passionate about visual art, marketing and communications, founded in 2005 and winner of many international awards.

According to your opinion, what role participation in creativity festivals and winning them plays for agencies and creative people from advertising industry today, in the era of global disruptions, rapid digitalization and the appearance of AI? 

We need good festivals. They are offering a possible reference point for "how good looks like" in a restless, kind of moving sands world, celebrating that sort of work able to challenge the status quo, setting a new standard & proposing an actualized hierarchy of values. Good festivals give hope both for the winners and the rest of the market, for exceptional ideas always paved the way for a new generation of unexpected solutions.

Projects with your participation have won numerous awards at prestigious international creativity festivals. Are there any cases among them that are most valuable to you, which brought inspiration to you during their creation? Can you tell us a little about them and why they are valuable to you?

Dragan Sakan Award for the impact on Eastern European Advertising was a special one to me, for it celebrated my passionate lobby for the region's rich culture abroad, through creative education programs, jury nominations, niche events at global industry gatherings, but also for the diverse coaching series for companies, agencies and young talent, enabling them to perform both in business and in creative competitions alike, by being reverent to local culture's DNA. The Romanian voice of Foreign Policy offered a similar award for "People and ideas that are changing the country for the better". Eastern Europe was - still is - a challenged region, with a tumultuous political life, but with an incredible level of talent. In early 2000, when I start motivating agencies to enter big advertising shows like Cannes and later on Eurobest, almost no one believed in their inner resources to break the glass ceiling and to go beyond local and regional competitions. I told them – and I still think it’s a relevant message today – that grand juries are looking for culturally rooted solutions to universal problems. Nobody in the jury is interested, after all, in the budget’ size, nor exclusively in a production’s magnitude. We have Hollywood and Bollywood for that. They all have their radar set for exceptional ideas that move, while bringing results. In ideas that make you laugh, that can help you relate with, that are sometimes irreverent, but so insightful. They are looking for culturally rooted ideas, local solution keys to unlock business problems that are virtually universal. To reach what I love to call “the goose bumps” level, one doesn’t need first a colossal budget, but an exceptional idea. And to reach that level, my message for the market was to stop looking elsewhere, to love its problems and set its radar for the rich culturally rooted solutions within. Big festivals are as what Terry Savage used to call “United Nations of Creativity”. Nobody wants to see a talent from Romania faking the profile of an American creative, but everyone is curious to see what a Romanian has to say on a brief such as selling a chocolate bar, a pair of shoes or fighting identity prejudice, in a relaxed, non-aggressive key.

You have judging experience at many international creativity festivals, and this year you will be judging the entries of White Square Festival. What new aspects would you like to see, what are the key criteria for evaluating projects for you?

How creatives manage to use AI in an unexpected way and and how they solve business problems while relating to culturally rooted ideas, bringing on the table business results, while offering coaching or delightful entertainment for the audiences. I am a true believer in brands that do more than selling a product and have healthy business results. I believe in brands doing the extra mile in an intelligent, win-win-win key, generating healthy pop-culture shifts and uplifting their audiences in the process of doing good money.

It has always been trending at festivals to talk not only about the latest tendencies in advertising, but also about the values that brands translate, about social advertising and its role in commercial projects. What social values are most actively supported by brands in your country?

Many brands are involved in health, fighting poverty and endorsing sustainability rooted platforms - healthy energy & healthy lifestyle, which is good. My soft spot remains Education, ideally highly performant, contemporary education, where creativity plays a crucial role. I love efficiency and if we want to think at what's best for the society on a medium and long term, we need to provide people the right tools so they will be able to generate positive change around pretty fast, leading by example, while teaching others at their turn. You know the principle - give someone a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life. Tearjerking causes tend to be more popular and sometimes I suspect some of their promoters for social responsibility washing. If one wants a healthy society, should invest more in the doctors' education than in hopeless patients, to make sure such cases will decrease, not increase in time, isn't it?

What inspires you for your work? Perhaps, hobbies, family, friends or colleagues?  

Traveling in countries with a stigma attached to their name and exploring their cultures. So very often the street reality is so far away from what one can read in the first hand available media. There are huge identity perception biases related to what we expect to find as behavior or level talent in one country or another. Living beyond the perimeters of the media reputation provided for a given nation exposed me to completely different reality. In Brussels, beyond beautiful buildings and inspiring art galleries, I've discovered prejudice and life threatening situations, while in Tel Aviv as much as in Beirut, incredibly welcoming people, fluent in several foreign languages (and I speak now about the taxi drivers as much as about the creative directors) and open minded, highly vibrant ad industries were dialogue and appetite to build effervescent projects were alive and kicking. Several years of extensive travel in Asia and in the Middle Eastern countries inspired me to launch loveandlobby.com, a private diplomacy platform promoting talent beyond cliches. This world is full of amazingly gifted people, it's quite sad we move in a perimeter where we are encouraged to believe only some nations are entitled for the creativity label. Gardening, good movies and holidays cooking are on my list as well.

What would you like to wish to the participants of White Square Festival 2024?

To always start solving a brief having in mind society and (pop)culture, while reaching out for business-proof ideas. And if they can add a delight / entertaining layer to it, either through mindful design or visual languages, even better!