Year-End Champion’s Breakfast about Where we Are
It is said that it is worth taking a pause at the end of each year to take a look back and the paths that we have taken, what we have experienced and where we have found ourselves during the course of that year. It was with that purpose that we organised the 26th Champion’s Breakfast at the restored National Museum of Art to talk about where we are as a country in economic terms, what kind of people there are in the present-day generation, what they consume, and how the art museum was reborn.
The appetizer was the head of the Faculty of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics in Rīga, Morten Hansen, who tried to answer the ancient question of whether the glass is half full or half empty when we look at Latvia’s economic development since the restoration of the country’s independence. Morten has lived in Latvia for more than 20 years and has concluded that Latvians are too self-critical and less hopeful than he would like them to be.
The main course featured DDB Latvia HUB project director Niks Evalds, who challenged the current separation of generations, and offering the idea that all active residents should be called the WHY generation – people who are constantly looking for answers and posing more and more critical questions about brands. Niks talked about the way in which technologies influence the WHY generation and its communications environment and behaviours, adding that brands must speak to the modern audience.
After a lot of economic and digital talk, dessert was served by Māra Lāce, who talked about the bid for tenders that was launched to find restorers for the National Museum of Art and about the idea of expanding the museum – something that was important even in the 1920s and 1930s, when the museum was run by the artist Vilhelms Purvītis. The idea remained on paper at that time, there was a ban on putting up additional buildings in the present day, and so the bid for tenders was won by the Lithuanian architectural firm Processoffice, which proposed the expansion of the museum underground. The restored museum won an annual architectural prize this year.
Photographs from the 26th Champion’s Breakfast can be found here. See you next year.
