Speakers and guests

Radoslav Nesterović

Rasho Nesterovic is one of the best Slovenian basketball players ever. He began his career at Slovan and later became the first Slovenian to play regularly in the NBA league. He was chosen as 17th on the NBA Draft by Minnesota Timberwolves in 1998 where he played for 5 seasons before he became the NBA Champion with San Antonio Spurs in 2004/2005 season. He had been captain of the Slovenian national basketball team where he scored 530 points in 52 matches. In September this year, he has ended his active career and became the EuroBasket Slovenia 2013 ambassador.

Petra Majdič

Petra Majdic is the most successful Slovenian cross-country skier ever. She won twenty World Cup sprint races which makes her the second-most successful sprinter in FIS Cross-Country World Cup history and with 24 wins in total she’s the fourth most successful World Cup competitor of all time. Petra is the first Slovenian cross-country skier to win the World Cup race, the first to get a medal at the World Championships and the first to get an Olympic medal from the unforgettable run in Vancouver 2010. She won the best Slovenian female athlete of the year award three times, received also the Bloudek Award in 2007, SPORTO Brand of the Year award in 2009 and 2010. Petra remains active at the Ski Association of Slovenia also after her career, where she is included in the sponsorship activities and management. She is also the ambassador of the Planica 2017 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships.

Didac Lee

Dídac has become an entrepreneur at the age of 21 and is now a partner and the founder of several information technology oriented companies, with Spamina, Matrix, Zyncro, Hotelerum and The Etailers among other, which employ over 240 people across the world. He was born in 1974 in Girona, Catalonia (Spain) to his to Chinese parents from Taiwan. Dídac , who fluently speaks five languages (Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, English and French), has a PGD from IESE. Today he is a member of Board at FC Barcelona for Technology Area (New Technologies) which at 36 years old makes him the youngest among others. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Barcelona and University of Girona and works as a columnist in the business section of elPeriódico magazine.

Vlade Divac *

Vlade is one of big names in basketball. He was one of the first European basketball players breaking up in NBA in the late 1980s, where he spent most of his career. Vlade is one of the six players in NBA history to record 13,000 points, 9,000 rebounds, 3,000 assists and 1,500 blocked shots, along with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kevin Garnett and Hakeem Olajuwon. With LA Lakers he played the NBA Finals against Chicago Bulls in 1991 and played All Stars game as the Sacramento Kings player in 2001.

He was the president of Partizan Basketball Club from 2000-2004. In 2008 he was appointed as a government adviser in Serbia for humanitarian issues and was elected as the President of the Serbian Olympic Committee on 24th February in 2009. He has been a member of the Executive Council of the Association of the National Olympic Committees (ANOC) since 2010.

Divac is also known as humanitarian helping children in his native country of Serbia, as well as in Africa. He founded his own Humanitarian Organization Divac (HOD), established with the mission to provide financial, material and other resources necessary to fulfil physical, mental, social and other needs of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and uncared-for persons, regardless of nationality, race, religion, politics or any other background or orientation. Divac received a prestigious honour from the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

* Video Interview

Andreas Gollhofer

Andreas Gollhofer began his work as a Sport-Editor at NÖN (Regional Austrian Newspaper) in 2000. Besides studying, he had been a Student Brand Manager at Red Bull (Austria) between 2002 and 2004, where he also accomplished his internship programme in Central-America. Between 2004 and 2006 he has moved in Sport Management department of Red Bull and in 2006 he has started to work at Milka (Kraft Foods Europe) in the Sponsoring and Event Marketing department. After graduating in International Business Administration at University of Vienna, Andreas finished the MBA at Bond University (Australia). He fluently speaks German, English and Spanish.

Toby Hester

Toby holds more than 20 years of sponsorship and sport marketing experience. He has presented a plethora of international brands including Coca-Cola, Honda, T-Mobile and Jaguar. Spanning sports events such as the NFL, Tour de France, F1, FIFA World Cups, EUFA European Championship and the England Football team, he has brand and ROI building experiences that have broken new boundaries within the industry. Toby currently heads the Castrol In-Tournament exploitation of the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa and 2014 in Brazil. He is director of the European Sponsorship Association where he represents the interests of the sponsors’ membership on the board.

Mitja Petrovič

Mitja is a Director and co-owner of the Publicis Groupe in Slovenia. He has managed to transform a successful and creative boutique into a modern and successful communications agency during the last 10 years. Publicis, whichs unites international standards and domestic creative excellence, has been awarded as the Agency of the Year in 2009 and 2010 at the Slovenian Advertising Festival (SOF).

Mitja has been educating at several international seminars of strategic planning as well as holistic and contagious communications. He was given a chance and privilege to take part in developing several domestic and international brands, while his work was awarded at advertising festivals like Epica, Cannes, Moscow Festival, Cresti, Golden Drum and SOF. Mitja was also awarded with a prominent Advertising Person of the Year award in Slovenia in March 2010. The same year he also became the only European to receive Publicis Lions award for special achievements for the development of the agency. For their “Velik si, kolikor imaš veliko srce” campaign, Publicis received SPORTO Awards for best sponsorship and best advertisement at the SPORTO Conference in 2010.

Mitja was drawn into advertising by his passion for radio advertisements, which brought him winning the first Golden Drum award in 1993. He had studied archaeology at University of Ljubljana before that.

Tomaž Krajnčič

Tomaž Krajnčič had earned valuable marketing experience in Abanka and Union Brewery, before he became the Director of Marketing and PR at Hypo Alpe Adria Bank in 2000. At the moment his primary goals are creating values, vision and strategy of the organisation according to the financial plan and planning and controlling sales promotion activities as well as evaluating their efficiency. He believes sport is the area that brings good results once it is supported with other sales promotion and marketing tools. Hypo Alpe Adria Bank is famous for their long-term sponsorships – they are included in the League ABA (Adriatic Basketball) since its beginnings, more than a decade they have been sponsoring Pokal Vitranc (FIS Ski World Cup) – but their main sponsorship project remains with the FA Slovenia and their sponsorship of the Slovenian National Football Team since 2004.

Tom Rudolf

Tom Rudolf is one of the leading Slovenian specialists for brand management. He has earned innovative marketing communications expertise working for some leading domestic and international brands from different industries for the last 20 years. He argues for the analytic approach to consumer behaviour in order to follow holistic and long-term marketing activities from the development of the product to sales promotion activities. Since 2006 he has been leading strategic marketing activities in the telecommunication company Amis, which is also a partner of Dejan Zavec, one of the leading boxers in the world in welterweight category and one of the most popular and recognised athletes in Slovenia.

Maja Makovec Brenčič

Currently an Associate Professor for international business operations and marketing, and Deputy Dean for development at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Ljubljana. At this and other universities abroad, she lectures on international business operations, international marketing, strategic marketing, interorganisational marketing, marketing in sports, and marketing in health care. She is President of the Slovenian Marketing Association and Vice-President of the Advertising Tribunal at the Slovenian Advertising Chamber, President and Member of the Programme Council of the Slovenian Marketing Conference, member of the Marketing Council of the Slovenian Olympic Committee, and President of the SPORTO Award Committee. She is also co-founder and President of the Student Business Conference, which connects the research work of students with the needs of companies.

Jožko Križan

Jozko graduated in Sociology and started his career as an analyst in the Media Research Analysis Department at Pristop agency in 1999. He has been running preojects and researches in ReproMS, Mediapool and Advertus before he got employed by the system integration company SRC.SI as the Head of Marketing. In March 2009 he has became a General Director of OCS – Olimp, the marketing company owned by the Olympic Comitee of Slovenia (OCS) that manages the development and execution of the marketing strategy of the OCS, marketing activities of Slovenia on the Olympic Games and others.

Ranko Ćetković

Ranko is the Head of Marketing and General Secretary Deputy at the Olympic Committee of Croatia. The project to be highlighted in his career is the setting up of the first sport TV channel to be in the ownership of the national Olympic Committee. He has leaded the Croatian Olympic Villages in Athens 2004, Torino 2006 and Beijing 2008 and received the special award for the development and reputation of the country from the Croatian president himself. Ranko has finished the Masters in international relations studies.

Matjaž Rakovec

Matjaž Rakovec has been the CEO of the biggest Slovenian insurance company Zavarovalnica Triglav since 2009. He holds rich experiences in the insurance business and is strengthening his business network through international sports organisations and is also a big sports fan. At the moment he is the president of the Slovenian Hockey Association, the board member of the OCS, the member of the Business Advisory Board of the Faculty of Economics of University of Ljubljana and a Member of the Board of Governors at American Chamber of Commerce in Slovenia. As a father of two daughters he devotes most of his spare time to the family.

Dejan Kozlina

Dejan has been the Head of Marketing at the Olympic Committee of Serbia since 2006, where he is responsible for the sponsorship pool. Before that, he was employed at RTV BK where he was leading the TV production project of Football World Cup 2006 for the Serbian territory. His career before that was as the general secretary of the Serbian Table Tennis Association, where he worked for 8 years, after he finished his studies at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade.

Arndt Jaworski

Arndt Jaworski has earned 10 years of experience in sports marketing industry and has specialised in the Distribution of Marketing Rights. Among others he has successfully sold main sponsorships for VfL Bochum in 2002, Hamburger SV in 2003, Aston Villa in 2003 and National-Team Spain in 2005. In the period of 2004-2006 he has been the Senior Director of Sportfive Team for FC Kaiserslautern and from 2006 to 2008 he has been the Member of Management Board at FC Kaiserslautern e.V. He has finished a degree in Business Law and speaks German, English and French.

Zlatko Zahovič

Zlatko Zahovic has scored 35 goals for the Slovenian national football team which makes him the best scorer in history and which strongly helped achieving unforgettable qualifying to Euro 2000 and World Cup 2002. He has ended his rich career in 2005 and decided to continue working in the football industry at his home club in Maribor. He has become the sports director of FC Maribor in 2007 where he is successfully leading the club reaching trophies in Slovenia and successes in European competitions. Some most prominent Slovenian football players have been signing for the FC Maribor and consequently some scouts from famous foreign clubs are attracted on their games.

Đorđe Stefanović

Djordje Stefanović is a Secretary General of Football Club Red Star Belgrade, European Club Champion from 1991. Before this function he was in the role of a Business Director of the club. Djordje started his business career as Head of Marketing of RTV BK Telecom, later he was managing Director of Sport Media, Managing Director of sports centre Banjica and also daily newspaper Press. He got his university degree in Minnesota, USA and concluded MBA from marketing in Sion, Switzerland.

Roman Lisac

Roman Lisac is an ex basketball player and a General Director of the League ABA. He has accomnplished what even the biggest optimists did not believe – join together the biggest basketball clubs in the area of the former republic of Yugoslavia and form a strong regional league in Europe.

Srečko Vilar

Srečko Vilar has devoted his career to skiing. He has been active since 1980 organising the FIS World Cup events where he has been general secretary for several years. He is currently a member of the Sub-Board at FIS. Srečko has become the Director of Universiade 2013 Maribor in 2010.

Mojmir Ocvirk

Mojmir Ocvirk has been the President of Slovenian Triathlon Federation since 2010 and as a partner in Imelda Ogilvy agency in Slovenia he aspires to transfer the sports marketing know-how to Slovenian Triathlon.