HOW I DID IT
WORDS BY JOSH SIMS
Changing the way advertising is sold is no mean feat, but it’s one that Katarina Skoberne’s media background helped her to crack. Welcome to OpenAd, the world’s first democratic online marketplace
NO MORE BIG BOARD ROOM PITCHES, NO INSIDER DEALING, NO LIMITING THE POOL OF POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE BRIEF, NO MORE WASTED TIME. It was not a new idea, though. In fact, OpenAds co-founder Vital Verlic thought of it 20 years ago: a system by which advertising creatives and companies looking for creative advertising ideas could meet on the open market. The internet provided the means—as it was doing for a new generation of stock photo services or social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace—and OpenAd provided the system. Companies subscribe to the website, place their brief for a new campaign on it, and ad creatives around the world can offer their ideas. The creatives get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to some of the world’s biggest brands, while the brands get access to a huge pool of talent.
The fact that Verlic, an advertising executive himself, was based in Slovenia was perhaps a motivating force. Coming from a small country provided him with a can-do attitude. The same was true of his colleague Katarina Skoberne, now 39: a one-time Slovenian TV hotshot-turned advertising innovator, she took Verlic’s idea and developed it into one of the most exciting advances for the international advertising industry in recent years; potentially one that could revolutionise how it operates.
 After all, Skoberne spent her formative years, aged nine to 14, in the United States, during a boom time for media, with herself making the dramatic switch from a socialist country to the world’s most rampant purveyor of consumerism. When she was back in Slovenia, opportunities didn’t just come knocking—they beat the door down. Trained in electrical engineering but finding herself in a suit doing a nine-to-five for a media company, Skoberne was asked to be a talking head on advertising for national TV. The opening rapidly snowballed and soon she was presenting her own TV show, interviewing the great and good (and the not-so-good) of the media industry—from film director Wim Wenders to Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi.
“When I graduated the whole economy in Slovenia was in transition to a market economy,” says the 39-year-old. “That brought with it enormous upheaval but also great opportunities—you could make enormous leaps in a career and handle
huge accounts with very little experience. You would never get that chance in any other economy.” It also brought an enthusiastic interest for a subject that, further west, was considered a kind of cultural wallpaper, exciting chiefly to those who worked in the industry.
 “Again, the rest of the world may have been saturated by advertising and wouldn’t have been that interested, but Slovenia’s transitional economy was,” Skoberne adds. “People wanted to know how advertising approached them and potentially manipulated them. But it gave me license to ask all the things I wanted to know and dig in to find out how the advertising industry worked at all levels.”
It was the kind of education that paid off. After seven years, Skoberne quit TV in order to look for a new challenge, and it wasn’t long before, in 2003, Verlic called her up and asked her to come on board to develop the strategy for the idea he was finally making real. Skoberne used her contacts to test the proposition. On paper it was, as she puts it, “a nobrainer—it’s just selling work by creative professionals worldwide to companies worldwide.” But, she stresses, 95% of any idea is in the implementation. “It’s how you make it work that matters,” she says.
And success has come. Gillette, among other multi-national brands across 125 countries, are now using the portal as a way of spreading the net for creative solutions as far as possible, while the site has attracted some 11,000 creatives from more forward-thinking, independent agencies seeking the increased kudos that comes from working with major names. This has led to Skoberne being named one of the 1,000 Most Influential People in British Business by the Daily Telegraph. In theory at least, the site has democratised the advertising industry, such that a good idea could come from almost anywhere. “The initial reaction was, ‘well you can’t just have anyone deliver a solution in advertising’, but it turns out that you can,” says Skoberne. “Creatives in India or Latvia are competing on an equal footing with those in the US or UK. And an idea may be produced by an amateur, but it’s never of amateur standard. This gives value to ideas again. It’s not someone using powers of persuasion to tell you their idea alone is genius.”
1. There are very few things that are too urgent to not do them well the fi rst time.
2. People are the absolute, number one asset—but not everyone is able to work in a new and growing company.
3. As Lincoln said: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the fi rst four hours sharpening the axe.” do your research, make sure there is a market for your product and fi ne tune it however necessary.
4. When push comes to shove, if you are motivated, you’ll fi nd you have almost unlimited reserves.
5. It is really important to get suffi cient amounts of sleep.
 Professional trendspotter Reinier Evers on this month’s best business idea
But certainly the development of OpenAd has not been without it complications. While the internet has made OpenAd’s product more accessible and the sales process much faster, Skoberne concedes that, had other sites not already become the phenomena they are, Fortune 500 companies may not have been so accepting of the whole concept. Sharing ideas and the “open source” approach of problem-solving networks may have long been common in the medical community, but not in the dog-eat-dog commercial world of advertising. There has been a reluctance to change.
“There are still companies that want to maintain the status quo and that’s a strong and active resistance. There is a feeling in the advertising world that, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. But in a way it is broken. The old advertising model hasn’t moved on because it runs on very comfortable margins, but is so out of tune with what the business community is and wants these days,” says Skoberne. “Creative solutions are sourced and paid for in a very opaque way and that causes frustration: it is hard to gauge how much time it takes to come up with an idea and whether you really need to go brainstorming in the Lake District for a week or not. You don’t want to commoditise intellectual services but there has to be some benchmark as to what an idea is worth and that can’t be measured in time and materials. It doesn’t work that way in any profession anymore.”
 Verlic and Skoberne decided that the best method would be to effectively sell a license to the creatives’ work rather than the work itself. “It’s like buying a piece of music, not the artist’s studio time,” as Skoberne puts it. Most problematic were the legal issues: how to ensure that a creative’s ideas are not taken without the appropriate recognition and remuneration and how to encourage creatives to offer the highest quality ideas when they fear that they may be stolen? Skoberne says every click is monitored and that OpenAd only takes subscriptions from companies with a reputation for respecting intellectual property. Failing that, OpenAd is ready to get legal, though the need hasn’t arisen.
“Word of mouth is spreading and we’re having to do less convincing of creatives that the method is safe. That was question Number one for them initially, but now it’s all changing,” says Skoberne. “The point is that at the end of the day this is a market place. It’s the better ideas that are wanted and the better ideas that are sold. But the whole system could be a much bigger market place. At the end of the day I’d like to see it become the ultimate intellectual property rights platform.”
Appropriately then, Skoberne’s favourite ad is “the crazy ones” series for Apple Mac, which celebrates a certain kind of nuttiness required to change the world. Maybe OpenAd will feature in such an ad one day. www.openad.net
Swedish fashion label Filippa K is promoting a longer life for its products by letting customers sell them in its second-hand store, which just opened in Stockholm.
While Filippa K came up with the concept for the branded second-hand shop, the day-today business is to be run by Judits Second Hand, a popular destination for vintage finds.
Situated next door to Judits at Hornsgatan 77, Filippa K Second Hand sells women’s and men’s clothing and accessories. Items brought in by customers are sold on commission. In addition to used items, the boutique will also sell design samples, which should help bring in the fashionistas. The shop is part of a larger effort to become more environmentally aware, and Filippa K doesn’t aim to make any money reselling their garments.
Filippa K’s creative director, Filippa Knutsson, stated that the concept is fully in line with what the brand stands for, pointing out that resales are made possible by Filippa K’s high quality, timeless design. While brands like Patagonia and Uniqlo recycle fabric from used items, Filippa K’s emphasis is on reusing clothing, stressing its longevity and creating a healthy antidote to fast fashion. www.filippa-k.se
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