"How many of you think time is more precious than money?" Almost every hand in the room went up. That was how Teodora Migdalovici, Creativity Ambassador at TheAlternativeSchool in Bucharest, opened her ADFEST 2026 session, “It’s About Time”. She reframed the idea of time with the ancient Greeks’ distinction between 2 different concepts of time Chronos, which measures chronological time, and Kairos, which measures quality time. While we often focus on time as a commodity to be measured, Teodora advocates for stepping "outside time" to create work that feels timeless and resonates deeply.
Teodora reminded us that the traditional P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process, etc.), often makes us over-rationalise so much that we forget who we are trying to relate to. Instead of trying to get people to buy your products, you must focus on building relationships. The key is to shift from a “Design Thinking” to a “Design Feeling” approach, which relies on emotional intelligence to build genuine relationships with people rather than viewing them merely as consumers or an audience.
Teodora asserted that time’s greatest value is its plasticity, and the creative industry has the opportunity and ability to convert Chronos (wasted time) to Kairos (high quality time). As creatives, we should strive to master time by mastering the emotional frequency we create to build real connections with people. Like the short film contest by Montblanc, The Beauty of a Second, which was not only engaging, but also gave value to time, and celebrated the brand’s legacy. Or Spotify’s Spreadbeats that came up with an ingenious way to connect to and communicate with media planners to spend on ads on Spotify.
So the question Teodora left the room with wasn't "what time is it" — where are we in the schedule, how many seconds did we buy. It was "whose time is it?" The time always belongs to the person watching, not the brand. They lend it to us a few seconds at a time, trusting we won't waste it. As Teodora put it, treat your audience's time the way you'd treat someone you love. Timewise, and otherwise.
Teodora shared some time tips and tricks from successful campaigns:
Respect their time: campaigns like the classic Geico Unskippable Ads or Budweiser’s One Sec Ads, took only a second for their content, but both managed to spark timeless conversations.
Respect their privacy: Burger King in Finland; on the other hand,exploited a cultural insight of the Finnish discomfort with small talk and introduced a silent app-based drive-thru: order, pay, and go, with no small talk. Less time, more business. Or Hutchwilco Lifejackets’ Secret Fishing Spots that respected the secrecy and kept interactions based on necessity only.
Find the Goldilock Moment: identify the opportune time like Tesco Homeplus’ Subway Virtual Store by Cheil Worldwide
Play with time: get creative with how you can go back in time to build on the present, which was exactly what Publicis Conseil did for Darty in Long Lasting Reviews, and what Uzina did for Ikea in its Hidden Tags campaign to use the past to serve the present.
Timing matters: the night can be the perfect time to reach out, as Rethink did so brilliantly with their cheeky U Up? campaign for Ikea mattress.
Anticipate: be ready to react and respond to unexpected times, as illustrated in Hailstorm in Istanbul, another campaign for Ikea, which used the upcoming hailstorm forecast to advertise for its colourful carpets to cover and protect your cars.
Cross Pollination: find opportunities and time for untapped communities like McCann Worldgroup Romania did for MasterCard’s Roadside Market and managed to seamlessly share the brand’s and the community’s time.
So the next time you sit down to create your next campaign, design it with feeling and to do it as a gesture of respect, love and compassion.
