Linza agency's 2023 explainer video for the International Renaissance Foundation distills 3,000 years of European values history into five engaging minutes for
Linza Agency Reframes European Values for Ukrainian Audiences
Linza agency's "Adequately explained European values" is a single approximately five-minute explainer video produced for the International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine in February 2023, designed to communicate the historical roots and lived meaning of European values to a culturally engaged Ukrainian public in informal, entertaining language.
The campaign emerged from a joint initiative between the International Renaissance Foundation and the European Union under the EU4USociety project, as documented on linza.agency. Rather than producing a formal institutional film laden with directive titles and policy citations, linza agency set out to create something closer to a conversation — the kind of explanation one might offer a friend across a kitchen table. The result compresses nearly three thousand years of European intellectual and civic history into a single cohesive narrative that avoids the bureaucratic register typical of public-information media campaigns. In Ukraine, where the question of European identity carries immediate political and human stakes, the choice of register was itself a creative argument.
The campaign targets what linza agency describes as the "creative class" — viewers who expect clarity, brevity, and a degree of entertainment even in educational content. This is not a niche demographic in the Ukrainian context. As noted across linza's project documentation, the agency positioned European values not as abstract ideological constructs but as principles already embedded in everyday Ukrainian life. The video was published in Ukraine in February 2023, a period in which the country's relationship with European identity had been sharpened by more than a year of full-scale armed conflict. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting its structural discipline and contextual clarity within the education and media industries. The Ukrainian-language title, "Що таке європейські цінності?", translates directly as "What are European values?" — a question the film treats as genuinely open and worth answering well.
Linza agency identified a persistent failure mode in public-interest media: the tendency of institutional clients to default to formal, compliance-driven language that alienates the audiences most capable of amplifying the message. The strategic insight driving the 2023 campaign is straightforward — if European values are to resonate with Ukraine's creative and professional class, they must be presented in a voice that class already trusts.
The International Renaissance Foundation, a Kyiv-based philanthropic organisation with decades of civil-society programming in Ukraine, brought linza agency into the EU4USociety project with an explicit mandate to avoid producing another bureaucratic explainer. As documented on linza.agency, the agency and client agreed from the outset to strip away the long names of EU directives and formal policy documents, replacing that apparatus with a text written as if for friends. This is a recognisable strategic move in the digital media landscape: the explainer format, long used by news organisations and civic communicators, succeeds when it prioritises the audience's mental model over the institution's preferred taxonomy.
In Ukraine, the broader digital media environment provides context for this choice. Media and entertainment represented a significant portion of digital video activity in the market during 2023, a period when Ukrainian audiences were consuming video content at elevated rates under wartime conditions. Globally, the digital video advertising market was estimated at approximately US$184.2 billion in 2023, according to marketdataforecast.com, with the media and entertainment sector accounting for a notable share of that activity. Within Ukraine specifically, platforms such as YouTube served as primary vehicles for public-interest video content, with YouTube expected to receive approximately a quarter of surveyed digital-video budgets in 2023, according to benchmarkintl.com. Competing institutional communicators — including state information bodies and international NGOs operating parallel European integration campaigns in Ukraine — typically relied on formats that prioritised comprehensiveness over accessibility, an approach linza agency deliberately departed from. The hidden Easter eggs embedded throughout the video represent an additional strategic layer, designed to reward repeat viewing and generate organic word-of-mouth among a digitally literate audience.
The creative execution of "Adequately explained European values" rests on a single disciplined editorial decision: everything that could not be explained simply was removed. What remained was a five-minute film that moves from the ancient philosophical origins of European civic thought to the present day without losing a general viewer along the way, as documented on linza.agency.
Les Yakymchuk, Co-founder and Creative Lead of linza agency, articulated the creative intent directly. Speaking on behalf of the project, Yakymchuk stated: "European values are what our soldiers are now fighting and dying for, this is what the whole country is fighting for. That is why with this project we wanted to show that these values are not some abstract words, but real principles of life that are important for all of us. Accordingly, we tried to make the explainer as clear and accessible as possible for the viewer, both in terms of text and visuals." This statement, cited by linza.agency, frames the creative challenge not as a design problem but as a moral one: how to make proximity to an idea feel earned rather than imposed.
The film belongs to the narrative genre of the animated or illustrated explainer, a format that has become central to civic communication in the digital media era. Rather than relying on talking heads or policy documents, the production uses visual storytelling to carry a text written in a deliberately colloquial register. The campaign was classified across the content, digital, and film media categories, reflecting its cross-platform design intent. Iryna Shostak serves as CEO and marketing lead at linza agency, as noted on linza.agency, and the agency positions itself as a communications specialist for NGOs and socially important projects, as documented on Cases Media. This institutional orientation shapes the production sensibility throughout: the video is polished enough to hold attention but not so produced that it feels remote from its Ukrainian audience. The hidden Easter eggs scattered through the runtime are a craft choice as much as a strategic one — they signal to viewers that the people who made this film were enjoying themselves, which is itself a form of argument about what European cultural values look and feel like in practice.
The campaign generated documented audience engagement following its February 2023 publication in Ukraine. According to archive data provided by Clapboard, the video recorded 8,847 views, 166 likes, and 23 comments on YouTube — metrics that reflect a sustained, if modest, reach within the targeted creative-class demographic rather than a mass viral event.
These figures carry more meaning in context than raw numbers suggest. The campaign was not designed to achieve scale through paid digital media or broad advertising distribution. It was produced as a public-interest explainer for a specific and influential segment of the Ukrainian population at a moment of acute national significance. Within the education and media industries, explainer content of this nature typically succeeds by depth of engagement rather than breadth of reach, and the comment and like ratios relative to view count suggest an audience that watched actively rather than passively. The EU4USociety project framing, as documented on linza.agency, also implies institutional distribution channels beyond organic YouTube discovery — including civil-society networks, educational institutions, and media partners operating across Ukraine.
No independent third-party performance audit or formal awards recognition for this specific campaign is publicly documented at this time. Linza agency's broader credentials are verifiable: the agency appears on Clutch Co and themanifest.com as a recognised Ukrainian communications firm with a portfolio weighted toward NGO and civic clients. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects its structural coherence, contextual relevance to the Ukrainian market, and the clarity of its creative strategy, balanced against the relatively contained distribution footprint of a single-asset public-interest production.
"Adequately explained European values" is a 2023 Ukrainian explainer video produced by linza agency for the International Renaissance Foundation under the EU4USociety project. Published in February 2023, it distills nearly three thousand years of European civic history into approximately five minutes of accessible, informal storytelling aimed at Ukraine's creative class.
The International Renaissance Foundation commissioned the video as part of the EU4USociety project. The IRF is a Kyiv-based philanthropic organisation with longstanding civil-society programming in Ukraine, and it partnered with linza agency to avoid the bureaucratic tone common to institutional media campaigns of this kind.
Les Yakymchuk, Co-founder and Creative Lead of linza agency, led the creative direction of the campaign. Iryna Shostak, the agency's CEO and marketing lead, also played a key role. Both are documented on linza.agency in connection with the EU4USociety production and the agency's broader NGO-focused communications practice.
Linza agency abandoned formal institutional language in favour of a conversational register written as if explaining the subject to friends. The video also embedded hidden Easter eggs throughout to reward repeat viewing, a deliberate craft decision aimed at making civic content genuinely entertaining for Ukraine's digitally literate creative-class audience.
According to Clapboard archive data, the video recorded 8,847 views, 166 likes, and 23 comments on YouTube. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting its structural discipline and contextual relevance to the Ukrainian market, though no independent third-party performance audit is publicly available.
Linza agency identified Ukraine's creative class — professionals who value clear, informal, and entertaining information — as the audience most capable of amplifying a civic message organically. As documented on linza.agency, the agency and the International Renaissance Foundation agreed from the outset that accessibility and warmth would be more persuasive than policy-document formality in the Ukrainian context.
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