History of Festival

International PR-Festival has been successfully held for more than 10 years and is unprecedented in Ukraine. Year in year out the Festival gathers more and more new participants and partners, gradually making rapid progress. Here, in this section, we are proud to show you our landmark milestones.
2017, Кiev
Radisson Blu

2017, KYIV, RADISSON BLU HOTEL

The XV International PR-Festival, one of the oldest and the most branch-wise events held on the territory of Ukraine, took place on April 12, 2017. The capital’s Radisson Blu hosted over 30 reputable speakers and more than 200 participants.

The semi-jubilee Festival, whose organizing committee has avoided discussing political issues on principle for the last several years, was dedicated to communications in the age of post-truth (“post-truth” is the word of 2016 according to the Oxford Dictionary). “In the changed world, the truth does not mean anything anymore. That is, it has a meaning for a particular person at a particular moment. But it has ceased being an absolute value for the society as a whole,” explains the head of the Festival’s Organizing Committee Olena Derevyanko (a partner at the PR-Service Agency, vice-president of the Ukrainian PR-League, Doctor of Economics).

The audience expressed a lively interest in the speech of Olena Derevyanko and Valentyn Korolko, Doctor of Philosophy, professor, head of PR Studies Department of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Their entry was dedicated to the context and tendencies of modern PR. The panel on fact checking and mass media information reliability was very informative; heads and editors of the leading media as well as independent experts took part in it. Denis Bezliudko, the development director of the Realist online project, Ihor Darmostuk, the editor-in-chief of KievVlast online news portal, the independent expert Oleksandr Klimashevskyi, the political consultant Dmytro Kasianov, Svetlana Kriukova, the deputy editor of Strana.ua online newspaper and Olena Martynova, the strategic marketing director for “1+1 Media” joined the discussion.

During the Festival a lot of time was dedicated to exchanging views on strategies and tactics of reputation management. A frank speech of Vitaliy Opanasiuk, PhD (Economics), co-founder and director of Impel Griffin services company, literally reverberated. Its topic was “PR: “The First Person’s” Viewpoint”. The businessman, whose success story was once headlined by Forbs, said in particular, “People like me should first of all be invited to this Festival. For everyone to understand the importance of reputation and the value of erroneous decisions.”

Representatives of Publicfast, AIR and ТСН.ua projects spoke about their working with opinion leaders – experts, bloggers and videobloggers. While speakers from the banking sector, retail, multibrand companies, etc. dwelt on a PR-expert’s functional in companies of various business models and on their branch peculiarities of public relations. A traditional trait of the Festival was the presence of powerful corporate brands, “Ukrgasvydobuvannia” PJSC, Bayadera Group, ESTHEL, L'Oréal Ukraine, Maybelline New York, Nielsen, StarLight Media, “WOG-Retail” among them.

Finally, the Festival culminated in awarding the winners of the Third National Rating of Corporate Reputation Management Quality “Reputation Activists” that gathered together the leading experts in 13 branches of economy and the chief executives of leading Ukrainian companies.