Last week we met with Emma Beckmann, Country Director of Landor Moscow in their cozy office on Tsvetnoy Boulevard to talk about the results of their first year in Russia. In the interview, she discusses how the creative industry has changed over the 20 years that she’s been in this business across different geographical markets, kindly shares her view on the Russian bureaucracy and ways to tackle it, reveals her personal client wishlist, and gives valuable cultural advice to international agencies looking to enter the Russian market.

Creative Social, founded in 2004 by Daniele Fiandaca and Mark Chalmers, is a collective of the world’s most pioneering, interactive creative directors and business owners (the Socials)—a group of people who recognise that collaborating in this digital landscape is how they’ll advance the industry and enjoy the journey.

Mr. Simon Bolton, a silver-haired noble English gentleman, who dedicated a few decades of his life to the advertising industry, met with us on a chilly Tuesday morning earlier this week to talk about TBU’s business plans in Moscow, to discuss opportunities and threats from the latest Publicis-Omnicom merger for WPP, and to share his vision of a sustainable brand.

Pursuing an architectural degree, he realised he didn’t have enough patience to master that complicated  discipline, so he quit it and turned to a related field—graphic design. Later in 2003, he founded his own design agency The Plant, jumped into the food business, and launched the Feast food festival in 2012. Recently he has celebrated the release of the first issue of his agency’s own printed media—the fanzine Tomorrow’s Chip Paper, based on ‘true food stories.’ All this is about Matt Utber, an Australian expat in the U.K., the founder of the boutique-sized design business, an art lover and food connoisseur.

Thomas Kolster, a 35-year-old former Danish-English copywriter and concept developer, after almost a decade of working with a number of global brands at some of the world’s leading advertising agencies one day realized that he hated 99% of advertising and messages those brands communicated. In 2010, he dared to raise the question that everybody thought of, but was ‘uncomfortable’ to discuss in public—in his debut book called “Goodvertising: Creative advertising that cares,” published by Thames & Hudson last year.

CARTILS is one of very few brand and design agencies that, being originally Dutch, has become a strong name with a global outreach. We’ve talked with Gaston van de Laar about his work experience with CARTILS, about art of pitching, collaboration with Grolsch, Baltika and the trends which shape the beer branding nowadays.

We recently talked to Drew Smith, Founding Partner and Creative Director of Lumen Group, who told Popsop about why he ended up in Milan and founded his own branding company there, why being sustainable meant being profitable, and about the relationship with Russia and Lumen’s Moscow-based partner agency Mildberry.