Gabriel Stan — founder of Tekpon and the CEO of The Next Web (TNW) — joins Andrei Tarnovski on Boringly Effective to explain why trust, not traffic, is the real product of a media brand.

Gabriel is the Romanian entrepreneur who acquired The Next Web from the Financial Times rather than let a 20-year internet institution be shut down. In this conversation, recorded in Romanian at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion during Cannes Lions 2026, he and Andrei discuss the fundamentals behind durable businesses: create value before you chase money, watch cash flow more than your bank balance, and focus on the client instead of the trophy.

They also cover what it actually costs to run a media brand people trust more than the truth, why advertisers buy positioning rather than reach, how a single 2014 article followed two people for over a decade, and why — in a market flooded with AI-generated news — the people behind a brand may be becoming its most defensible asset.

Boringly Effective is hosted by marketing strategist Andrei Tarnovski. No magic. No hacks. Just the fundamentals, argued properly.

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Produced by SYMBOLON, with support from the RoCreativity program by FEPIC and ARICE.

#TheNextWeb #TNW #GabrielStan #MarketingEffectiveness #Media #BoringlyEffective

Beatrice Mustocea, Creator & Public Figures Lead at TikTok, joins marketing strategist Andrei Tarnovski on Boringly Effective to explain how the creator economy actually works — creator marketing vs paid ads, distinctive brand assets, authenticity, monetization, and who actually owns the future.

Beatrice Mustocea joins Andrei Tarnovski for Boringly Effective, the show about the marketing fundamentals that actually work.

Recorded at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion during Cannes Lions 2026, this conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: when a brand works with the right creator, why does it keep outperforming paid media — and when the fit is wrong, why does it fail?

Beatrice and Andrei dive into the things every marketer claims to understand about creators, and the things most get wrong. Why every creator is effectively a walking set of distinctive brand assets. Why a creator partnership is a producer, director, editor and videographer in one. Why authenticity may be a depreciating asset — and why the better word is relatability. And how creators actually make money, from Creator Rewards and live gifting to TikTok Shop and brand deals.

There is plenty of proper marketing in this episode, too. Binet and Field's 60:40 rule, Byron Sharp on reach, the difference between a TikTok trend and a real behavioural shift, a Netflix activation that worked because it wasn't obviously branded, and a BBC partnership that turns digital creators into television presenters.

And there is a rapid-fire round: one million super fans or a hundred million strangers, reach or trust, a brand deal or equity in a brand, fame or freedom.

In this episode:

Why creator marketing beats paid ads when the alignment is genuine
"Every creator is a huge set of distinctive brand assets" — and what brands get wrong
Why you're not just buying ad space, you're buying a creative team
Binet & Field's 60:40 rule, and whether creator work builds long-term brand
How TikTok × BBC Creator Lab turns digital stars into TV presenters
Why YouTubers are dominating the box office, and the creator economy is merging with Hollywood
Is authenticity a depreciating asset? The case for "relatability"
Platforms, brands and creators: who owns the future (they coexist)
How creators actually earn — and why brand deals aren't the only way
Trends vs fads, and why chasing every trend quietly destroys brand consistency
Boringly Effective is hosted by Andrei Tarnovski, marketing strategist and founder of TARNOVSKI. The show is for marketers, founders, strategists, agency people and brand leaders who prefer fundamentals over fashion.

No magic. No hacks. Just the fundamentals, argued properly.

This Cannes Lions series was produced by SYMBOLON, with support from the RoCreativity program by FEPIC and ARICE.

Subscribe to Boringly Effective for more conversations about marketing effectiveness, strategy, creativity and the boring work behind brands that actually grow.

Subscribe to the Boringly Effective Newsletter at BoringlyEffective.com for a weekly round-up of the most important marketing news, plus links to the latest podcast episodes.

References: Beatrice Mustocea, Andrei Tarnovski, Boringly Effective, TikTok, creator economy, creator marketing, marketing effectiveness, marketing strategy, brand strategy, distinctive brand assets, authenticity, relatability, monetization, Cannes Lions, TARNOVSKI

What does it take to build national recognition for creative industries from outside a capital city—and resist reducing Romanian talent to low cost?

In this Romanian-language episode of Boringly Effective, Mihai Lupu, a representative of FEPIC (the Federation of Employers in the Creative Industries), joins Andrei Tarnovski at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion during Cannes Lions.

Lupu explains why FEPIC is proud to have been founded outside Bucharest and how Romanian Creative Week takes creativity into the streets of Iași. The event, now in its sixth edition, began after the pandemic with resources that were almost entirely private.

The conversation moves from place-making to policy. Lupu describes more than 15 years of work to secure recognition for Romania’s creative industries and argues for a strategic direction that can survive political turnover. His recurring point is that recognition, brand effects and institutional progress require quality, consistency and time.

They also discuss:

- FEPIC’s role and the creative infrastructure built in Iași
- Romanian Creative Week and the democratisation of creativity
- An AI-based installation featuring a hologram of Brâncuși
- How Romanian work should be presented internationally
- The difference between creative visibility and immediate commercial results
- Public and private support for creative-industry initiatives
- FEPIC’s employer structures in nine fields and events covering all 12
- Godmother’s two years of observation before its first Cannes shortlist
- Why creative and brand results are usually incremental
- The idea behind Untapped Creativity

This is a grounded conversation about regional confidence without provincialism, ambition without instant gratification, and creativity as both culture and productive capacity.

The episode is spoken in Romanian. The video version on YouTube includes English subtitles.

No overnight transformation. Just the patient work of building visibility, institutions and creative work that improves from one year to the next.

WARC Chief Content Officer David Tiltman joins Andrei Tarnovski to discuss the widening gap between marketing evidence and practice, platform-driven content churn, cross-market learning, machine-readable brands and why craft still matters.

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Marketing knows more about effectiveness than ever. Yet David Tiltman says the gap between best practice and what appears in the market is getting wider.

In this episode of Boringly Effective, WARC Chief Content Officer David Tiltman joins Andrei Tarnovski at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion at Cannes Lions.

Their conversation examines why brands are becoming less consistent while evidence increasingly supports consistency; how platform incentives pull advertisers toward small executions, short durations and constant testing; and why, in Tiltman’s words, “There seems to be a lot of testing but not a lot of learning.”

They also discuss:

WARC and CreativeX data on the volume and investment behind advertising assets
The balance between brand and performance
What research in Asian markets can teach marketers elsewhere
The limitations—and continuing usefulness—of effectiveness-award datasets
Why smaller markets should not be treated only as followers
AI’s “second-order effects” on distinctiveness and brand strategy
What it means for a brand or advertisement to be machine-readable
Mastercard, “Priceless” and the value of long-term coherence
Why creativity may work differently on models and human minds
Why marketers should spend less time on LinkedIn and more time studying the work itself
This is a conversation about evidence without dogma, AI without easy answers and creativity without forgetting execution.

No magic. No hacks. Just the difficult work of turning what marketing knows into what marketing does.

Key words: David Tiltman, WARC, marketing effectiveness, Cannes Lions, brand consistency, coherence, advertising, AI, machine-readable brands, brand strategy, CreativeX, brand and performance, creative craft, Boringly Effective, Andrei Tarnovski, marketing podcast

In this episode of Boringly Effective, Andrei Tarnovski speaks with Andrew Tindall of System1 about creative testing, AI, emotional response, and the practical realities behind effective marketing.

They get into:
- why most creative data should only be spent on the top 10% of assets
- why AI prediction still cannot replace real human response
- what System1's new model says about creative effectiveness
- why positive emotion still tends to win
- the economics of B2B creator content
- why the current AI boom is heading toward a price war
- why craft remains a powerful signal of quality

If you care about marketing effectiveness, creative testing, brand building, and the gap between theory and reality, this is a conversation worth your time.

Boringly Effective is a podcast about the boring work that makes marketing work.

A sharp, candid conversation for marketers who want less noise and more truth.

Mark Ritson joins Andrei Tarnovski on Boringly Effective to talk about marketing effectiveness, pricing, creativity, Cannes Lions, luxury brands, Madonna, Baudrillard, Romania, sex, beer and why the boring fundamentals still matter.

Mark Ritson joins Andrei Tarnovski for the first episode of Boringly Effective, a podcast about the marketing fundamentals that actually work.

Recorded at Cannes Lions 2026, this conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: does all the marketing talk at Cannes actually change how companies behave?

From there, Ritson and Tarnovski move through the things marketers claim to believe in — effectiveness, long-term brand building, creativity, pricing, strategy and focus — and the things companies often do instead: chase short-term numbers, underinvest in media, overcomplicate objectives and underestimate the commercial power of price.

There is plenty of proper marketing in this episode. Ritson argues that pricing may be the most underappreciated lever in marketing, explains why creativity can amplify media spend but rarely replace it, and reflects on what smaller and more Latin markets may understand about creativity that Anglo-Saxon markets often miss.

There is also BMW, Chanel, Burberry, Apple slowly becoming a luxury brand, Madonna-style reinvention, Jean Baudrillard, the public performance of being “Mark Ritson”, the Mini MBA, Bucharest, țuică, dogs, beer, flooring and one marketing joke about innovation.

In this episode:

- Why marketers still underestimate pricing
- Why fewer objectives might make companies better at marketing
- Whether Cannes Lions changes marketing practice or just creates conversation
- Why creativity multiplies investment, but cannot usually compensate for no investment
- What BMW and Chanel get right about reinvention without losing the core
- Why Apple may be on a long road toward becoming a luxury brand
- What Baudrillard has to do with the video version of Mark Ritson
- Why Ritson’s public bluntness is mostly real, but not the whole person
- Why the answer to every marketing question is apparently “innovation”

Boringly Effective podcast is hosted by Andrei Tarnovski, marketing strategist and founder of the consultancy studio TARNOVSKI. The show is for marketers, founders, strategists, agency people and brand leaders who prefer fundamentals over fashion.

No magic. No hacks. Just the fundamentals, argued properly.

This Cannes Lions series was produced by SYMBOLON.studio, with support from the FEPIC.ro and ARICE.gov.ro.

Subscribe to Boringly Effective for more conversations about marketing effectiveness, strategy, creativity and the boring work behind brands that actually grow: www.BoringlyEffective.com