Developing business strategies means more than just the ability to plan and anticipate. It is a statistically, scientifically, and creatively grounded path of a brand, product, or company in the market. The strategist is involved in creating such a development path, and often, his vision determines the business's success. This material brings together five Ukrainian strategists who have succeeded in their craft.

Roman Gavrysh
Partner, strategic director, and co-founder of the marketing agency Aimbulance

In 2011, some Brainberry employees left the company due to disagreements with senior partners and founded the Aimbulance agency. The managing partners of the newly created company at that time were Roman Gavrнsh as a strategic director and Viktor Dubrovin as a business development director.

Already in November 2018, Aimbulance was transformed from a digital agency into a full-cycle marketing agency. During the nine years of their existence, they have implemented digital campaigns for Walk with Giants, Pepsi Refresh Project, McDonald's, Citroen C4, Lvivske, Ax Rise Up Campaign, Captain Morgan, Bushmill's, Jose Cuervo, Khortytsia, SAB Miller - Velkopopovicky Kozel, TUI, Citroen, Silpo, OLX, and others. Until 2020, Aimbulance has foreign offices in Belgium and the United States, has repeatedly become the most effective digital agency of the year according to the Effie Awards, Advertiser's Choice Digital agency in Ukraine, also won the Red Dot for design and was shortlisted for Cannes Lions.

Roman Gavrysh began his career as a political analyst with a bachelor's degree in political science from NaUKMA. He worked at the Social Design Agency at UMC. Before joining Aimbulance, Gavrysh founded and managed the Brainberry online agency from 2007 to 2011 and the first version of the Mapia project.

Hailing from a village in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, Roman said in an interview: "If you were born in a village, you have two options: work on the land or run. The logic is simple. But I graduated from a village school and was a third-grader, so especially without prospects". In addition to managing Aimbulance, Roman is a lecturer and presenter at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, which is based at NaUKMA.

Yaroslav Serdiuk
Strategy Director and co-owner of Banda Agency

Banda Agency was founded by three successful employees of the Ukrainian branch of Leo Burnett — Pavlo Vrzheshch, Yaroslav Serdiuk, and Yegor Petrov. Lacking business experience, investment, and clients, the founders of Banda decided to organize a Table Tennis Club and began to hold championships between the offices of various Kyiv companies. They shot promotional videos and printed posters of the competition, one of which caught the eye of the marketing director of the Ukrainian representative office of Puma, who offered the agency to develop an advertising campaign. It was so successful that it was launched in six other European countries and then entered the world's top effective campaigns Puma for a year. Then Banda received her first Effie Awards.

In addition to strategic and managerial work at Banda, Yaroslav trains a new generation of advertisers, writes a column and believes that a truly strong brand can describe its Strategy while riding in the elevator to the 3rd floor. "To do this, he does not need to press the stop button, take out his laptop and open a large PowerPoint presentation. The Strategy will sound simple, but it will be immediately remembered. You will want to see the next advertising campaign of this brand because you will understand "what will be said," and you will be interested to know "in what form." Understanding your strategy "in a nutshell" leads to effective and consistent communication. Failure to understand or inability to formulate a strategy in short leads to chaotic advertising campaigns, concussion, and noise on the air."

Banda Agency is one of the most titled Ukrainian advertising agencies. Among its awards is the victory at the world design competition Red Dot Award for the identity of the song contest "Eurovision-2017" with a necklace. In June of this year, Banda Agency became the most efficient independent agency globally and received another Effie Award in its collection.

Yevhenii Myroniuk
Brain Tank Group Strategy Managing Partner: Brain Tank C-suite Agency, Royal Advertising Creative Agency, Ant Hill Event Agency

Yevhenii is the most private of the top Ukrainian strategists. His future profession was determined mainly by training in an experimental school. It was founded in the city of Surgut by SMD-methodologists, namely colleagues of Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, the inspiration of a whole generation of post-Soviet philosophers and political technologists. Yevhenii was able to establish his love for slender systems at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics at KPI.

Today Yevhenii Myroniuk is a top expert in creating and promoting brands, financial startups, sports brand management, launching developers, and construction projects. His list of professional achievements includes working with PepsiCo, Grawe, Philip Morris, ABB, lifecell, JDE, Veon, Microsoft, Metro Cash & Carry, Rosava, as well as creating more than thirty brands for residential and commercial real estate businesses in Ukraine. A special place in professional history is occupied by creating and managing the first continental cycling class 2.2 in the country — Tour of Ukraine, which brought the national and continental team in the top ten in a few pre-crisis years. Today Yevhenii manages relations with key partners, manages the department of analytics and business development strategy in the Brain Tank group.

Brain Tank is a full-cycle marketing communications agency. Since 2004, it has gone from inhouse-PR media holding, through the advertising agency Royal Advertising, until in 2019, a group of companies merged into a highly efficient "machine" — Brain Tank, led by Yevhenii Myroniuk and Andriy Franchuk. The uniqueness of the agency's methodology also lies in C-suite consulting (or executive advisory) i.e., such a bespoke board of directors, thanks to which your problems are solved by CEO, CFO, COO, CIO from around the world. They are not as expensive as staff advisors, and participants can be involved at their discretion.

According to Yevhenii Myroniuk: "When the cost of error is high, the client [thanks to C-suite consulting] receives expertise that is impossible in a classic agency. There is never confidence that the team understands how the client's market category works. Related to parabanking services, we [in Brain Tank] involve Viktor Yushchenko, the chairman of the National Bank in 1993-99 and the third president of Ukraine."

Fedoriv Andriy
Founder and CEO of the creative investment company FEDORIV GROUP

In fact, Andriy Fedoriv's career began in 1992, when he started attending the Junior Business Club, studied marketing, and competed with his friend to earn more money. Until the age of 20, Fedoriv took the position of director of development at the international company Adell Saatchi & Saatchi, and in the early 2000s, he founded the advertising agency "Apricot." It was there that an advertising campaign was developed for the 3rd plant of reinforced concrete structures named after Kovalska, and the brand "Concrete from Kovalska" was created. In 2006, Fedoriv's agency rebranded the First Ukrainian International Bank, and in 2007 it won the "Footprint in Advertising" nomination. From 2012 to 2016, Andriy was the Chairman of the Board of the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition.

In 2010, Andriy Fedoriv founded the creative company FEDORIV. It includes the agency FEDORIV AGENCY, which successfully cooperates with Ukrainian companies. In particular, the clients of the marketing agency at different times were: Rozetka, Nova Poshta, Watsons, Morshynska, Favorit, OLX, Oschadbank, Foxtrot, ICTV, Kyiv Zoo, Ukrnafta, and others. The agency also has had an office in Germany since 2018 and works with international clients. In 2014, FEDORIV included the public space FEDORIV HUB, and in 2017 FEDORIV VLOG, a YouTube channel about business and creativity.

In September 2019, Andriy Fedoriv and the Ministry of Digital Transformation created the project "Diia," the purpose of which is to digitize all government services into a smartphone. And with the introduction of quarantine in the spring of 2020, the strategist has made publicly available a training course for business owners "BrandFather." Now Andriy Fedoriv is a sought-after speaker and consultant on strategy, marketing, and innovation in Ukraine and abroad.

Mykhailo Traverse
Director of Strategy of the creative digital agency ISD Group

During his professional career, Mykhailo has created and implemented dozens of brand and communication strategies for Supradyn, Rennie, Aspirin, Huggies, Nivea, Nurofen, MTS Ukraine. Initially, Traverse worked on the client side of Bayer, an international pharmaceutical company, before moving to the agency in 2012. He says: "I came to ISD Group to do a business — a research agency that creates micro-companies and micro-social networks from certain brand consumers. While I was on the client side, it was very interesting for me, and I think it was interesting for everybody. But it turns out that brand managers don't want to spend so much time studying the consumer, they want a "report."

In 2019, ISD Group received the Cannes Lions for the AI ​​Versus project, which created an artificial intelligence system that answers the same question differently. In 2020, for this project, the agency received an award for outstanding achievements on the Internet — Webby Award 2020. Also, in 2020, the digital agency became the most creative communication agency in Ukraine, according to the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition.

Today, Traverse has 13 years of experience creating and implementing communication and brand strategies for international and local brands, including NIVEA, Huggies, Kotex, Morshyn, Vodafone, Geneva Tourism Office, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Implemented strategies have won eight Effie Awards.

According to Mykhailo: "Strategy is useful as much as it helps to generate cool creativity. If the right Strategy is not expressed in the creativity, it is a strategy like a bagel hole, it can not be activated, it is dead. Creativity makes people experience certain emotions we want. It is the power of creativity because our memory is emotions, and if they are right and strong, the creativity is in the right part of the brain and memory, and when the consumer finds himself in a situation involving this part of the brain, the brand will come to mind."

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