An article in Romanian business magazine Biz - bear with me though, it's in Romanian. That photo, by the way, was taken 4 years ago when I was a junior, it was my first photo shoot too. Brings back memories...

It's usually a bit tricky to try to explain Romanian campaigns, but this one should be fairly easy to relate to due to its, erm, rather international nature (though I am going to try my best to cover as much of the context as possible).

Two weeks ago, my former colleagues from McCann Romania launched a quite contentious campaign for ROM, a very traditional Romanian chocolate bar and one of the only brands to have survived the communist era (it's been around for over 45 years). Check out one of the ads:

And here's the other one. This was backed by print & outdoor ads, in-store promotions and all of that offline bit - but most of the activity came from the website and the campaign's Facebook page. Obviously, people went crazy over the fact that a brand was telling them it's 'cool' and 'refreshing' to replace the Romanian flag on the label with the Star-Spangled Banner. So they channeled their disappointment through home-made videos, the campaign website's comments box and through hate pages and causes on Facebook (apparently there have been over 10.000 reactions so far just across Facebook, according to a preliminary estimate). Here's my favourite.

Then people found out that it was all meant to more-or-less trigger a show of hands on who loves the old ROM - check out the updated website for the reveal - and to brilliantly support the brand's tagline (which I will roughly try to translate): 'strong Romanian sensations since 1964'.

One of the best campaigns I've seen in a while... Congrats to the team!

Things seem to be going back to normal over here!

Behold Romania's new tourism brand. The concept cost €890K. To me it just looks like something pulled out of a template pool (and actually Realitatea.net has a pretty convincing story about that). Oh and the slogan font is just pathetic.

Now do I know that no matter how good or bad a national tourism brand looks, there will always be someone to criticize it, but come on...

McCann PR and Microsoft Romania have received two Distinguished Honors from The Stevies' International Business Awards: one in the Best Online Press Room category (for Microsoft Romania's Digital Press Centre) and one in the Marketing Campaign of the Year - For a Product category (for the launch of Windows 7 in Romania). I'm very proud to have contributed to these campaigns. Congratulations to everyone who was involved!

I vote for the latter. I personally think that these so-called hackers are utter morons. What do you think?

Like just about any Romanian my age, I've always been keen on vacating the country at some point in time - but I could never find a good reason.

Looks like I just found one, though - or better said, it found me, in a quite magnificent way. More to come.