Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
Do you dream? Do you dream often enough? Do you dream big enough to maintain your fitness in advertising? Do you have great dreams about your agency and your brands? A man who doesn’t dream and doesn’t try to realize his or her boldest dreams has a boring, unfulfilled and unrealized life.
The legendary Dragan Sakan said that great ideas are born in dreams, and that they first need to be dreamed, before they are made real. That’s why he went to bed with a notebook and a pen, to write down the great ideas he dreamed of.
Of course, creatives are not the only ones dreaming about advertising. There are other areas in which to dream. One of the greatest dreamers was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He dreamed of America without racism, where whites and blacks can walk on the same side of the street, drive in the same buses, vote and be voted for in elections. In less than a month (April 4th) it will be 50 years since Dr. King was killed at the hotel room balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.
Dr. Martin Luther King is world-renowned, among other things, for his famous sentence I Have A Dream.
This is the year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that is why over the next ten or fifteen days we will have a regular section I Have a Dream on the portal every day, in which the great dreamers and great names of our regional communications industry will talk about their dreams. What they dreamed of when they were small, what they dreamed of when they entered the world of marketing, and what are their dreams today? It will be a chance to take a peek into the secret worlds of great creative creators and managers in the advertising industry, so we can see how much dreams help them to be successful in the business they are dealing with.
I have a somewhat strange attitude toward dreams. When I was a little boy, I dreamed of becoming a journalist. I’ve always dreamed about it. I wanted to be a popular and well-known journalist. In the first step to the realization of my dreams I made a huge mistake, which took me years to correct. Seven grade and the first semester of the eighth grade of primary school I spent in Peć (Kosmet). After the first semester of that eight year, my family moved to Sarajevo. After completing the eighth grade, instead of grammar school (to study journalism later), I enrolled in an electrical engineering high school. No connection between the two, right? But immediately from the first grade, I used the opportunity to realize my dreams and thus be connected with print media – I became the paperboy for Oslobodjenje daily. I woke up every morning at 04:00 am, and rushed to the printing house that was half an hour of walk from my home. Be it hail or rain, I was the first to make the trail, so I could get the newspapers and deliver them to subscribers. I was happy. I was going to become a journalist, and some other boys will one day start delivering newspapers with my texts in them. My area was very big, so I had to rest three times during my trip. During those breaks, I would read the daily news, looking for the most important texts, and I already had my idols in journalism.
A couple of days after I barely finished the technical school, I began to volunteer in the correspondence office of the Belgrade-based Večernje novosti, then in Večernje novine, and finally in the Oslobodjenje. I wanted to settle in one place, so I went to Radio Sarajevo. I asked for an interview with the editor-in-chief of program Sarajevo 202. I delighted him with my ideas and started working right away. It was in the fall of 1971. Thus I achieved my first and greatest dream. Later on, the work at Radio Sarajevo’s marketing department would pull me away from journalism, but after a couple of years I returned to writing and talking in front of the microphone. I was one of the first people who practically applied the thesis that every successful media product is a result of good co-operation between the marketing and the journalist departments. Only in this case I was both.
I continued dreaming. I wanted to be popular. I wanted people to know me, respect me and appreciate the results of my work, not the power of the media that I worked for. Every night I would start to think about ideas for tomorrow. When you think about something, the moment you start slipping into dreams, you start dreaming about what you were thinking about. And different ideas would come to me. There was a hyper-production of ideas, so much so that I stopped dreaming in the classical sense of the word, and started living my dreams, day by day. It has been so to this day. In order to survive in the work I do, which is editing and publishing a daily portal of Media Marketing, I have to dream and live my dreams both day and night. This morning I got up at five o’clock, and opened the folder with the texts for the portal. It was empty. I know that until the evening we have to have 8 to 10 texts that will attract the attention of our readers. And then the sparks of imagination and dreams start flying, and now, as I write this, and it’s 07:00am, we already have a good plan.
Did I ever give up on some of my dreams, did I fail to realize some? Yes! Some of them I gave up because I did not have time to realize them, some because I later realized that they were not so big and significant, and some because I simply did not know how to accomplish them. For example, the dream of becoming a rich media publisher. I have achieved fame, and people know me. I believe that I have even accomplished that they respect me for what I do, how much I do, and how I do it. But wealth… That I did not achieve. I live well. I earn for a good living, but there’s no surplus, there’s no money for investment in the development of the portal which I would like to accomplish. But I’m one step away from achieving that dream as well. Some deals with advertisers are in the making, which would enable us to dig our hands a little deeper into our pockets and invest in our own development.