The column was titled after its central thesis: “10 qualities of a successful marketing director whom we will hire.” Pyvovarov was not describing an abstract specialist but a specific vacancy. The company had been looking for someone to fill the position for around six months and, judging by the text, could not find anyone who matched its idea of the role. The list has ten points: passion for the work, creativity, loyalty to the company, attentiveness, the ability to lead a team, strategic thinking, flexibility and an understanding of digital, storytelling, knowledge of the audience and channels, and an understanding of sales. The candidate must be able to dream up campaigns and at the same time count the money, not just draw pretty presentations.
The author illustrates the point about loyalty with the example of Oleksii Mas. For almost twenty years he appeared in public in a red shirt that became his calling card. After moving to Kyivstar, he turned up at iForum already in the company’s corporate colours. Mas is mentioned in the column once, and his name does not appear in any of the other nine points.
Pyvovarov’s overall idea is stated plainly:
“Good marketing directors don’t go to work to earn a salary”
For the author, loyalty means not slogans but behaviour: a person identifies with the company and its colours, even in small things. The shirt example is convenient in this sense because it is easy to see and remember.
Who Mas is and where he came from before Kyivstar
Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and studied at physics and mathematics school No. 145, then at the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University. From 1993 to 1997 he worked at NIIASS and at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine for payment processing. In 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, and in 2000 he began working on projects on the Ukrainian internet: UAportal and Derevo Druzei, the first social network on a Ukrainian portal.
The main undertaking of his career was iForum, the first of which was held in 2009. Mas was its co-organiser and ran the Internet Business stream, and together with Oleksandr Olshansky and Artur Orudzhaliev he worked on a conference that became one of the industry’s key venues. That is precisely why Mas’s appearance at iForum in Kyivstar’s colours was seen in the industry as a notable symbol of change.
In 2015 he joined Kyivstar as IT & Digital adviser to the company’s president, Petro Chernyshov, and later headed its Innovation lab. In April 2016, a month before the column was published, the company announced the VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar telecom accelerator. Pyvovarov was writing about marketing at a moment when telecom was actively looking for new ways to speak to a young audience, and Mas was one of the faces of that search.
What Forbes wrote about the shirt
Forbes examined the shirt episode in detail, but did so only after Mas’s death, which came on 6 October 2021. In an October retrospective the publication reported: after remarks at Kyivstar, Mas swapped his red shirt for a blue one. According to Forbes, he did so in order not to look like “a spy from Vodafone.” The explanation of the reason therefore belongs to the publication, not to Pyvovarov’s column itself, and it is not in the 2016 text.
The 2016 column recorded only the visible result: corporate colours at iForum. The rest became known later and from another source. That is why the example of loyalty in the text works as an observation from outside, not as an account of motives.
On 31 July 2019 Mas left Kyivstar. In August of that year he launched the Craft Social Networks project and a syndicate in which participants invested $100 each.
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