Smart vending is no longer just about what happens inside the machine. Screens are becoming part of the experience too, creating new opportunities to reach people in the right place and at the right moment.
At Invenda, advertising is an important part of how we think about smart vending. We do not only provide the technology. We also work closely with our partners to help them understand the audience, choose the right locations and make better campaign decisions.
Pavle Kraishnik, our Account Executive, Advertising, is helping grow this side of the business across different markets. His work keeps him close to the changes happening in DOOH and retail media, as well as the challenges advertisers face every day.
We spoke with Pavle about how he found his way into advertising, why context matters more than reach, how AI could change the industry and what readers can expect from his LinkedIn newsletter, DOOH & Retail Media Trends.
Invenda: To start, who are you beyond the job title? How would you introduce yourself to someone meeting you for the first time, in two or three sentences?
Pavle: I'm the Account Executive for Advertising at Invenda, building out our DOOH advertising business across Europe, Canada, and the Middle East. Originally from Waterloo, Ontario, I’m now based in Novi Sad, Serbia. Outside of work, I enjoy staying active, playing sports and chess, reading history and philosophy, and spending time in nature and hiking.
Invenda: How did you get into the world of advertising? Was it a plan or a series of coincidences?
Pavle: Definitely a coincidence. During my sales career I got a job at Broadsign, where I spent 3.6 years, and then jumped to Invenda. Each step made the next one make more sense in hindsight, but I never set out with this exact path in mind.
Invenda: What drew you specifically to DOOH (digital out-of-home)? What “sold" you on this channel compared to the rest of the advertising world?
Pavle: I never really paid much attention to OOH before working in the industry, it was something I'd occasionally notice but nothing more. Once I started working in it, I began noticing it everywhere, and that's what started to fascinate me. Unlike digital, you can't just skippast it, so seeing the creative ways brands work to hold attention in that format was genuinely interesting to me.
Invenda: Did you ever imagine you would work at a company like Invenda? What is it like to combine the world of advertising with a physical product where you can literally watch your ideas play out on screen?
Pavle: Not Invenda specifically, but I knew I enjoyed working in this industry, so ending up here feels like a natural move. Invenda is truly a one-of-a-kind media format and being able to introduce something like that to the market, and help build it in the process, is genuinely exciting.
Invenda: Thinking back to your early days, what did you believe mattered most in advertising back then, and what do you know today is truly key? What has surprised you the most along the way?
Pavle: When I first started in the industry, I used to think having the coolest creative was what made an ad campaign successful. Now I've come to realize that what actually makes a campaign successful is strategically targeting the right audience in the right placement, where that audience actually is. The creative matters, but it means nothing if it's not showing up in front of the right person at the right moment.
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Invenda: What drives you today? What makes this work still exciting for you?
Pavle: What drives me today is knowing I'm part of building something that didn't exist before in this industry. Invenda isn't an incremental improvement on an existing format, it's a genuinely new way for brands to reach people and getting to help shape that from the ground up is what keeps this exciting.
Invenda: You often say that reach is not the right measure of success, and that context and environment beat pure numbers. How did you arrive at that conviction, is there a specific moment or campaign that proved it to you?
Pavle: I came to this conviction by going through a large number of case studies on successful ad campaigns, specifically ones that moved a metric that actually mattered to the advertiser. The pattern was consistent: the campaigns that worked were the ones targeted at contextually relevant locations, not just the ones with the biggest reach numbers. That's what convinced me context beats raw numbers every time.
Invenda: Where is DOOH heading in the next five years? What should people in the industry be paying attention to right now that most are still overlooking?
Pavle: I believe we're going to see AI implemented across many different parts of the industry, from the media buying side to the selling side. Automating the planning and buying process, along with specific workflows on the media owner side, is coming. There are still a lot of areas in ad tech that are tedious and manual today, and with how developed AI already is, a lot of that operational work is going to become far less manual than it used to be.
Invenda: What can readers expect from your newsletter? What do you want them to take away from every edition?
Pavle: I'd love for people to walk away with a new or sharper opinion about where this industry is going, not just a recap of news they could've read elsewhere.
Invenda: If one sentence of yours were to stand next to your photo and represent the way you think about advertising, what would it be?
Pavle: The best media doesn't chase attention, it shows up exactly where the right audience already is.
Pavle shares a new edition of DOOH & Retail Media Trends every two weeks, focusing on the shifts that matter and what they mean for media planning.
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