If you know the Dedoles hamsters, you know Radovan’s work. Radovan Andrej Grežo is a creative director, copywriter and owner of the Somebody&Somebody agency. He spent years leading creative for Apple, and he has just published his second book. On our way to Upterdam, we spent two hours in the car together and hit record.
A short part of the interview made it into my Upterdam vlog. Here’s everything that didn’t.
He wanted to be an analyst. He ended up in advertising
Radovan originally wanted to be an investment analyst, a lawyer, or a management consultant at one of the Big Four. It didn’t work out. At seventeen, he started writing and realized it could pay the bills. He’d loved advertising since he was a kid. Back then, he says, he could tell within three seconds which brand a TV ad was for.
In the late 1990s, there were two ways to make a living from writing in Slovakia: newspapers or advertising. He chose advertising.
He never wanted an agency
At eighteen, he had big plans to run his own agency one day. Then he realized he wasn’t the right person to run a company. He freelanced for ten years.
The turning point came with Dedoles. As two freelancers, they created the hamster campaign, more clients started knocking, and Radovan saw the opportunity to build a small agency. That’s how Somebody&Somebody was born.
And how did Radovan end up working with Dedoles in the first place? At Upterdam, Jaro Chrapko told me it was thanks to networking. The full story is in my Upterdam 2026 report.
“I’m the hamster guy,” and he’s proud of it
For years, many people have known Radovan as “the guy who made the hamsters.” And for fifteen years before that, he was “the guy who worked for Apple.” Does it bother him? Not one bit.
In his view, it’s better to be known for the hamsters than to make ads nobody can trace back to their creator. Very few people in advertising, he says, can claim they created something people still remember after six months. And if someone can’t stand the hamsters? That’s a perfectly valid opinion. Not everything has to be for everyone.
The Apple job he almost turned down
This is my favorite story from the whole trip.
From the start of his career, Radovan kept his portfolio and LinkedIn in English, because he wanted to work abroad. That’s how a recruiter found him. The email landed while he was on vacation in Tel Aviv. They were looking for a creative director for one market, the brand was a global tech giant, but they couldn’t say which one.
Radovan figured it was HP or IBM. Nothing exciting. So he replied that he was on vacation, and if they couldn’t tell him who the client was, he wouldn’t make the deadline. The answer? Normally they wouldn’t say, but it’s Apple.
“Well, of course we’ll send it first thing tomorrow,” he recalls with a grin. He was a huge Apple fanboy. As a freelancer, he then worked as creative director for the Slovak market at Apple’s European headquarters in London.
Why he doesn’t want to work for corporations
Working for Apple was great. But Apple is still a giant corporation like any other. Since then, Radovan doesn’t have a dream brand he’s itching to work for.
He knows creative directors who make global Coca-Cola campaigns and win at Cannes. For twelve months they write spot after spot, and the client kills them one by one. And whether the final spot has any real business impact? According to Radovan, nobody knows.
He prefers working with smaller clients, where he talks directly to the decision maker. He just needs one thing: the client has to have a problem. He once received a brief for a TV campaign from a company with happy customers, a big market share and strong performance. When he asked what business problem the campaign should solve, the answer was: none.
Fairy Tales for Workaholics
Radovan’s second book, Pohádky pro workoholiky (Fairy Tales for Workaholics), contains 42 short stories. In them, he pokes fun at all the self-deceptions we tell ourselves at work just to keep from jumping out the window. That things are crazy now, but in a few weeks they’ll be back to normal. That we’re one big family at work. Or one of the lines from the book: if you don’t report, you don’t exist in a corporation.
The idea was born around 2016 over coffee with his friend Pavlína. Radovan wrote the first story, she liked it, so he wrote a second one. Then nothing for two years. In total, the book took about five years to write. This sarcastic humor, he says, is a reminder that work isn’t everything.
In Slovakia, you can buy the book at Martinus, online and in stores. In Czechia, the best way to order it is at preworkoholikov.sk, with delivery from Prague within two days.
What he’d tell his seventeen-year-old self
Think more about the business of running an agency, not just the creative side. For a long time, Radovan believed that if you did great creative work, everything else would follow. But creative is only one part of it. You need to understand how clients solve their problems and how to connect with them. And start doing that well before thirty.
I agreed with him on this one. During my four and a half years at Ecomail, working with agencies, it was always the same story: either you have too many people or too few. Nothing in between. Radovan added that switching from one state to the other takes about four days.
Where he’s headed
Radovan isn’t a planner. He isn’t building the agency to leave a legacy. What he works on most is making sure the agency’s wins and losses don’t become his whole identity. That’s one of the reasons he wrote the book.
He doesn’t want to end up as a manager who just runs people and never touches creative or strategy. But he also doesn’t buy it when someone says they don’t want a big company:
“I want a f*cking big company. If T-Mobile or a big bank walks in tomorrow and says, here’s a huge monthly fee, build me a 40-person team, I’ll do it.”
He’s just not chasing it single-mindedly, and he won’t be unhappy if it never happens.
Radovan, thanks for the interview, for the car, and for two hours that flew by. You can see the whole trip and Upterdam in the YouTube vlog and in my Upterdam 2026 report.
