Marketing from the inside: a talk for teens at IT from the Inside

On 20 October, the IT from the Inside (IT Zseredyny) project brought teenagers aged 14–17 to the Kyiv Youth Center on Khreshchatyk. The format is a conversation with people from the industry: how they got into their profession, what they do now and which skills really matter.

DOGMA was represented by the agency’s co-founder Kiril Treitiak. The topic: marketing from the inside — how to get people to show up, from a poster in a small town to your own app.

A talk with a few adventures

Right before the talk, the building lost power. Kiril drove home to get his own projector, which runs off a power bank. He switched slides from his phone using our app Remolo, which has a built-in clicker. Tested in the field: it really is convenient. The lecture turned out intimate and full of atmosphere.

Where it started

With a personal story. Drag racing in Krolevets, and friends need a poster. A layout in an online editor, a request to “send the PSD” — and a night spent figuring out Photoshop. Then the first client while still at school: an auto parts store, tens of thousands of products from 1C, and a database that froze at 90% on launch.

The conclusion that started the profession: the first marketing task is to get people to show up.

What marketing is

The explanation came through a story told at Harvard. A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. It asked customers what the ideal shake should be like — and sales stayed flat. Then a researcher from Clayton Christensen’s team spent a day in a restaurant and noticed that 40% of shakes were bought early in the morning, to go. People needed something to make a boring commute more bearable and to hold them over until lunch.

That is how the audience met Jobs to Be Done: when we buy something, we effectively hire it for a job. The example for teenagers was the school cafeteria queue: you “hire” TikTok to kill time, and its competitors are Instagram, Shorts and games.

Next came a game about Liquid Death. Ordinary water in a beer-style can, skulls and “Murder your thirst” — and a company valuation of $1.4B. Together we worked out why it worked: the insight, the concept, the enemy and provocative communication.

How it works on a real project

The main case was the VARUS.UA campaign for the 2026 World Cup. It started with a business task: app installs and first online orders during the tournament. The constraint: just over a week for six videos in four formats, banners, ASO and radio.

Kiril also showed how AI helped. The project’s working board held more than a thousand frames and two hundred video generations. AI speeds up the specialists’ work, while the team handles the idea, the script and the selection of frames. The result: 41.2M impressions, double the plan.

Another story was the Pepsi Challenge: in blind tests, people often chose Pepsi, yet when they saw the logo, they more often chose Coca-Cola. That led to a point about the power of a brand — and to our summer video for Pepsi, which we watched together with the audience.

Our own product

The third part was about Remolo, an app that shows your Mac’s screen on your phone. It began with an email that reached support at 10:46 pm with the subject line “This is just f***ing amazing!”, which we unpacked as a small piece of research. Then came 18,023 reviews of other apps, a gap in the market, a two-word name, hypotheses ranging from a “remote for Mac” to Mac ↔ Mac, and our own RemoteCore protocol.

There was also Remi the mascot, who came alive on the slide and changed emotions just as he does in the app.

The main idea

A poster in Krolevets, a VARUS.UA campaign and Remolo are all the same task: getting people to show up. That takes understanding people, writing concisely, doing the maths and knowing how to work with AI. At the end, the teenagers got a challenge for the evening: read 50 reviews of their favorite app, find the most common complaint and write a one-sentence ad that answers it.

The presentation

You can flip through the presentation right here: use the arrow keys or click to switch slides, and press F for full screen.

Open the presentation in a new tab

Thanks to the IT from the Inside team for the invitation and to the audience for great questions.

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