I’m born in Wels, Upper Austria, and initially have my mother’s surname. My parents marry in March 1977. From then on, my name is Roland Trnik.
I feel a particularly strong connection to my mother’s side of the family, the Pucks from St. Veit an der Glan. Cooking has also been part of my life since my earliest childhood.
Why I’m called Roland
On my father’s side, the first-born son has been called Anton for generations. I’m called Roland because, shortly before I was born, my father’s best friend died in a mountaineering accident. My mother suggested naming me after him and persuaded my father and grandfather. My grandfather insisted that Anton be my second baptismal name.
My brothers are born: identical twins. The first-born is named Anton. At their christening in October, for the first time, I’m no longer the only child in the spotlight.
That day, I earn my first money through my own efforts. It’s a story I still enjoy telling over a meal.
My mother has to work full-time. It’s difficult to find after-school care for me as a primary school pupil. So my class teacher looks after me for a few months. Sadly, it’s no longer possible to say what this wonderful woman was called.
1990 is a defining year for me. I know I’m gay. Madonna’s “Vogue”, the song that shapes my youth more than any other, comes out that same year.
My first nights out on my own
I tell my mother I’m staying at my girlfriend’s. In reality, I go to Linz and discover the city’s “secret” nightlife. It’s also where I have my first experiences as a gay man.
Even so, I drop out of school. I want to earn my own money and no longer depend on my stepfather. My mother married him in 1986. I never recognised him as head of the family.
I start as an office clerk at bauMax-x in Wels. In my first year of training, working in the office alone doesn’t fill the day enough for me. I want to get to know the other areas of the store: the shop floor.
From my second year of training, I also learn retail. bauMax-x is an excellent place to train, and I thoroughly enjoy my working life.
A role model who stays with me
My start as a male office clerk attracts a lot of attention within the company. Even Commercial Councillor Essl senior takes an interest. I admire him to this day: he knows the employees in the stores by name, even without a name badge. To me, he is a man of great stature.
I can no longer hide my homosexuality from my stepfather. We have a difficult relationship. Moving in with my father and his second family seems like the most sensible solution. I move in with them later that same year.
I successfully complete my apprenticeship. Even before my final examination, I’m managing the garden department at bauMax-x. I’m a very young, very motivated manager.
On my 18th birthday, I move out of my father’s home. I’ve always said I’d do it on that exact day. Even so, he’s surprised and visibly hurt when I actually leave.
How I see this goodbye
I think he wanted to spend time with me and make up for what we’d missed in the years before. But that never mattered to me.
At OBI, I move from managing the garden centre in Wels and training additional crews to head office in Vienna. Creating elaborate plant displays and an enjoyable shopping experience is my passion.
In the ‘Operations Development’ department, set up for southern and eastern Europe, I’m responsible for signage and point-of-sale materials. Later I move into marketing, taking on POS marketing as well as in-store communications.
What I learn at ‘OBI Future’
At the head office in Wermelskirchen, I’m involved in ‘OBI Future’. We want to make it easier for customers to find their way around the large stores on their own.
I also help make OBI’s name more prominent as the sender of its communications. We deliberately give the beaver a lower profile, then bring it back later with a clearer role. I’m still a little proud of that.
In POS marketing, I get to plan and have enormous pylons built, and negotiate with ASFINAG. I gain incredibly valuable experience.
I take over as Head of Advertising at OBI. I’m responsible for Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Once again, I’m encouraged and challenged. Alongside work, I complete four semesters of communications management at Werbeakademie.
I feel as if I’m at the pinnacle of Austria’s advertising world: in charge of multimillion-euro advertising budgets and at the ‘right’ end of the food chain.
I get a new boss who understandably wants to put his stamp on communications. But I’ve already practically committed the campaign communications for another year. Conflict follows. By the end of 2008, it’s clear that I have to go.
The economic crisis suddenly makes my prospects of finding an equivalent job on the corporate side much slimmer. My time at OBI ends in March 2009.
My neighbour at the time, Markus Nutz, and I keep turning an idea over: marketing + technology = something new. I know he’d be drawn to it. But I never ask whether he really wants to take this big step.
In spring, I simply tell him by ICQ that I’ve made a career decision and we’re going to do it: SPiNNWERK.
Stimmfabrik is my first project as a self-employed person. I launch the new brand and then bring the client with me to SPiNNWERK. I’ve continued working with Stimmfabrik to this day.
I complete the Diploma Course in Online Marketing at Werbeakademie Wien. I deepen my knowledge, from e-commerce and community building to search engine marketing, tracking and analytics.
I’m responsible for strategy, planning, creative work and client advice. I win new clients, build the creative department and develop campaigns for the DACH region with the team.
We’ve been working on SPiNNWERK since 2009. In autumn 2010, we officially launch. As a brand-new agency, we’re invited to pitch for Unilever Austria’s social media work. It’s for Knorr.
Hanna Spegel knows the communications director, Barbara Fuchs-Puchner, from their time working together at a PR agency. Hanna and I were in the first cohort of the Online Marketing diploma course at the Werbeakademie together. I’ve known for a long time that I want her on the team. Along with Irene Schuch and Markus Nutz, she makes up SPiNNWERK’s founding team.
Our approach: we don’t want a community of people hoping to win a dream kitchen or great frying pans. We want people who simply want a small sample pack of Knorr products. People who are genuinely interested in the product, even though ready meals don’t exactly have a sexy reputation.
The idea isn’t easy to get across. I manage to persuade them. We’re initially promised 5,000 sample packs. Once the campaign goes live, they’re gone in two days. We increase the total to 10,000. People show that they really do want to try Knorr.
On 8 March 2011, the new account is announced publicly: SPiNNWERK handles social media for Knorr Austria (AllesWerbung).
Gunnar moves from Knorr to Eskimo. By the time we start working on the Tschisi comeback, people have been longing for the yellow ice cream for ages. There are already petitions, enquiries and activity on social media. We don’t have to create the demand.
On behalf of Eskimo, I develop a catalyst: a bet and the communications around it. The idea for the bet is mine. Peter Brandlmayr, my oldest friend from school, joins in. Through him I meet Marcel Schachinger. They’re both taking part for fun, without payment.
I lead the campaign, but Peter and Marcel have plenty of freedom to shape the bet and its communications. This still matters to me: when you bring multipliers, influencers or creators into a brand, you have to let them be themselves.
Even within Unilever, bringing the product back isn’t straightforward. The difficulties are real, and they’re communicated. The biggest problem is the factory manager’s handwritten recipe. First, it has to be found in piles of old files. Then we have to work out which recipe is actually the original.
The production line for the characteristic holes no longer exists either. Rebuilding a dedicated line for a small country would be expensive. The solution is the Brickerl production line. Tschisi comes back, but without the holes.
The comeback becomes one of Eskimo’s most successful product launches: in July 2013, Gunnar reports nearly eight million units sold since calendar week ten (HORIZONT).
With the launch, we win the entire Eskimo social media account. Before that, it was managed from Germany. Later, a journalist connects Peter, SPiNNWERK and me through check-ins. I go on to tell the case again and again in my lectures.
The first Tschisi samples arrive in Hamburg. At one of the tastings that matters most to me, Britta, her boss Susanne and I are sitting round the table. I can’t remember the exact date. It must have been towards the end of the year.
We share a single ice cream between several people. I think there are six of us. Those first samples are so precious to us then.
The big question is: does it taste like it used to? I taste it, and the memory is there at once: my childhood, that vanilla pudding flavour. A little piece of ice cream, and suddenly so much more.
Susanne Biljes, now Susanne Lutkat, quickly becomes more than a client to me. Something like a friend.
The next account we win is Magnum. I manage to convince Susanne, and we win all three countries: Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Building on our work with Eskimo, I take on responsibility for Magnum DACH. It’s the next step in our shared story. I still need to check the exact year we won the account.
As Managing Partner, I look after business development, personnel, employer branding, marketing and PR. I continue to be responsible for strategy, planning, creative work and client consulting in an operational capacity.
What I see differently now
My media appearances quickly make me the face of the agency. I don’t share the stage. My way of overwhelming people with enthusiasm and drive probably contributes to my relationship with Markus becoming more difficult.
I never really seek the limelight. It presents itself, and I take it. I’m more focused in a live TV interview than during a planned shoot for a feature.
I design, lead and market the Diploma Course in Social Media Management. I teach strategy, employer branding, content planning, social CRM, and analysis and monitoring.
Lipton is bringing hot tea to Austria. We’re asked to adapt the German campaign “Lipton welcomes everyone”: a house where everyone is welcome. For me, it becomes the most political campaign of my career.
Susanne is the driving force behind the campaign’s stance. I make absolute freedom in community management a condition. I know we’re in for a right-wing shitstorm. More than that: I want to use the provocation deliberately to boost reach. Susanne knows this and lets me get on with it.
The campaign visual is mine: “Offenheit versetzt Berge. Mehr denn je!” (“Openness moves mountains. Now more than ever!”). I deliberately use “Mehr denn je” as an allusion to Van der Bellen. It’s a presidential election year. The political charge is no accident.
I handle community management myself for the first 24 hours to protect my team. And because I enjoy being allowed to be cheeky. I have their full backing. Cheeky, yes; malicious or aggressive, no.
One comment sticks in my mind in particular: a user writes, more or less, that before drinking our “lefty-leftist swill”, he’d rather drink his own urine. I reply, more or less: Well then, enjoy it.
Less amusing are the calls for violence against me on Twitter, as the agency boss responsible. As I experienced it at the time, some come close to calls for my murder. Susanne stands by me even then. I feel less threatened than vindicated: in the campaign’s stance and in my assessment of the attackers.
DER STANDARD reports on the mobilisation, including from the Identitarian movement, against Lipton’s call for openness and exchange (DER STANDARD).
As I remember it, the article turns things around. The shitstorm is followed by a candystorm. People post photos of whole trolleys full of Lipton tea they’ve bought because they think the campaign is brave.
In the year before my exit, I push hard to turn the agency into a “full-service agency”. I still think that was the right direction. We disagree on what that should look like.
With the5thP, I try to put my idea of an integrated communications agency into practice far too quickly. I still think the direction was right. My execution as managing director and leader is a disaster.
I learn more from this failure than from any success: about myself, and about a healthy level of ambition and discipline.
After my exit, I lose touch with many people at Unilever. I stay in touch with Britta. I lose sight of Susanne and many others.
I never missed the corporation or its brands. But I missed the people from that time all the more.
This is how collaboration between brands and creatives should work for me: trusting one another, giving each other room, and standing together when the going gets tough. What remains isn’t the logos on a client list. It’s the people who made things possible.
Around the planned official opening of the5thP, my burnout becomes clear. What I want to drive forward is far beyond my strength. The following months become a serious personal crisis.
I receive incredibly kind and professional help in the psychiatric department at AKH Vienna. In occupational therapy, I learn bookbinding. To this day, I remember it with the greatest fondness.
I’m fit to work again as early as 2020. I keep the5thP going, most recently as a one-man operation. Keynotes, talks and workshops are just about keeping me afloat.
On the day the first lockdown is announced, all my keynote talks, presentations and workshops are cancelled. That means the5thP is no longer viable, even as a one-man show.
I don’t want to overextend myself again. Following a tip from my sister, I find a job advert at the NEUSTART association for ‘Digital Communications’, 30 hours a week.
There I find work that has a deeper meaning for me than my previous world of advertising and marketing. What I previously knew about PR in theory becomes my new field of work. At NEUSTART, I learn what good communication means in the truest sense.
Who I communicate with
Media contacts aren’t my focus; social media users, website visitors and colleagues are.
This is joined by the communication with institutional contacts that begins during my time there: people in the justice system, the ministry, the federal states, other public bodies, NGOs and NPOs. Communication with the association’s many volunteers and employees is especially important to me.
After my time at NEUSTART, I quietly return to self-employment. I try to do what I can.
I’m not as unwell during these years as I was in the crisis back then. But depression remains a constant part of my life. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve been fully mentally well since the mid-2010s.
At the beginning of 2026, despite my diagnosis of “treatment-resistant depression”, I decide to do everything I can once again to find “success” in my life.
In January, my long-time therapist, whom I hold in the highest regard, asks whether he can try ACT with me. I tell him he can try anything. The very first session becomes a turning point for me. I experience a change more quickly than I ever have in any previous treatment.
What acceptance changes for me
In my view, I owe him the greatest success of my first 50 years. Exploring radical acceptance helps me enormously, particularly in applying my teaching skills.
Years after leaving SPiNNWERK, I came across a sentence during my teaching qualification for university lecturers at FH St. Pölten: “To teach is to let people learn.” Now I’m beginning to feel what it’s like to be a good trainer, not just a good presenter.
I decide to have a comprehensive psychological assessment. The result is ADD. The extent of it surprises me greatly.
Since then, I’ve been taking Ritalin. The changes I experience over the following months mean an enormous amount to me.
My personal experience up to September 2026
By now, I’m taking lower doses of Ritalin. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I’ve gone a few weeks without sleep medication or antidepressants.
It feels as if my mind is working the way it did 30 years ago. I’m speaking English confidently and naturally again. The song lyrics from my youth are suddenly all there again.
I’m describing my personal experience here, not recommending that anyone take, change the dose of, or stop taking medication.
I work as a communications consultant, trainer and sounding board in Vienna. I bring experience from retail, brand communications, agency management and teaching. And experience of falling short of my own expectations.
With puck.house, I want to create a place where people can find their own strength. I’d rather see people on a stage, knowing I helped them get there, than see myself up there. That fulfils me. I have nothing left to prove to myself.
I start singing like a teenager: loudly, badly and with enthusiasm.
For me, this brings things full circle with Stimmfabrik. I’ve been working with this brand since my first project as a self-employed person in 2009. Now I can feel for myself how good singing is for me. For the first time in my life, I’m thinking about learning how to sing.
I meet a man I couldn’t imagine being more wonderful. Handsome, clever, well-educated. Full of love for art, culture, cinema and language. What follows is a time of wonderful, intense encounters: intellectual, sexual AND emotional. This is new to me in this form and with this intensity.
We love each other. And yet we meet at the wrong time, in what is actually the right place. On 15 October, he leaves Vienna. The decision was made before we met. Vienna, MY Vienna, wasn’t good to him. He has everything. Except snow-white skin. It hurts me that he experienced racism here.
I can’t cope with this amount of happiness and this lousy timing. Two more days. Him with me on my fucking 50th birthday. My world would look completely different. I’d probably have simply flown away with him for the weekend.
It all touches on my idea of Europe, too. I want a Europe that actively shapes immigration and gives people a genuine chance. Not because it would be easy or that everything about it is great. But because we need it ourselves. And because those of us who won the birth lottery owe more to the Global South than we’re willing to admit.
A decade of ‘The Pucks’ comes to an end. We were the 13th same-sex couple to marry in Vienna. Today we’re divorced, like more than one in three married couples in Austria.
As hard as the weeks before the divorce were emotionally, the divorce at the Innere Stadt District Court in Vienna is dignified, even humorous. The judge is very intelligent and very pleasant. It’s almost as if we’d met for a chat over coffee.
Addition, 30 October: One date, two new chapters
Only on 30 October do I find out that Gunnar Widhalm took over as managing director of Unilever Austria on the very day I got divorced, 1 October 2026 (Extrajournal).
A new role begins for him. A marriage ends for me. Two very different turning points, linked by a date. When I find out, I think about how our shared story once began with Knorr.
10 October at 10:10 is far too soon. But it’s too good a date not to use. There’s no chance of sleeping.
Then edition1010.wien goes online: my first brand of my own, thought up entirely by me. It has continued to develop every day since. I’m especially proud of the project’s European dimension.
It turns into the most disastrous birthday party of my life and, at the same time, probably the best day of my life so far. The party descends into chaos. Guests don’t show up. The fitters don’t install what was supposed to be finished. My food and drink delivery goes completely wrong. And at midday, the idiot that I am, I still think sanding the floor is a good idea. No. It wasn’t.
The House of Julius Meinl, and above all the amazing people there, help me out of the worst of the disaster. No fuss.
What’s left is (not) a party. But the Puck-Häuser are almost finished and fully functional, at least, in the form of websites for all my babies: puck.page, edition1010.wien, puck.house and my passion project, puck.salon. Digital first. A huge opening without a party.
The most beautiful moments of the day are the ones that bring the most tears. My ex-husband sends me an incredibly moving birthday message. My “oldest” friend, whom I’ve lost far too much touch with over the past few years, sees me in her message as I really am today.
A colleague from the advertising industry tells me in a voice message that she went through pretty much the same shit when she turned 50. And that I can be sure: the second half will be the decisive one.
I hear that a few times that day. Always from people who know what they’re talking about. Until then, I hadn’t realised they knew.
A full stop at the end of the first half of what I hope will be three. Because now I want to live to 150. Well then, I’m already looking forward to the third half. That’ll start “soon” too. Time feels more relative today than ever.
I’ve barely slept this weekend and I’m still sitting in the middle of the chaos. But I’m going to see this through: tomorrow, 19 October, this renovation madness will be OVER.
I’ll cook at 12 noon. I’ll serve food at 1 pm.
To whom? No idea. But from tomorrow, it’ll be (almost) business as usual at puck.house.
Nine days after my 50th birthday, I write down what’s on my mind that day: milestone birthdays, obligatory presents, worry, and the question of whether we still listen to one another.
“I’m looking forward to my hundredth birthday. Until then, I don’t want to be merely a reminder of your lovely past. I want to shape the future with you.”
I support people and brands with their communications. If you’d like to work with me on your positioning, your public presence or your next stage of development, I’d love to hear from you.
