Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
It’s the end of the year, and we are all making the final tallies, trying to recall the most beautiful things that have happened to us in the year that passed – something to remember it by. So I sat down in front of an empty sheet of paper, intending to figure out what I’m going to write about in my Diary. There have been many meetings this year, with very interesting people, many good (and successful) gatherings, exciting trips, conferences and festivals, crisis situations from which we emerged as winners… A coffee. Then another one. Then a veggie and fruit smoothie. And finally, four key things that I will remember this year by appeared on the paper before me.
In May, we released the Creative Portfolio, in which we presented 134 campaigns awarded at national and regional festivals last year. Campaigns were produced by 55 agencies for 96 advertisers. Without any fake modesty, I will say that I find this book a capital piece for the advertising industry of the Adriatic region. One of the reasons I feel confident to say this are the reactions of the agencies whose works were featured in the book, the reactions of creative team members whose names appeared alongside award-winning works and, finally, the reactions of advertisers for whose brands these works were created, and collected awards at festivals across the region. We also received surprisingly good responses from agencies whose works did not make it into the Creative Portfolio. I realized that this is because the book features details about 134 award-winning campaigns, including the brief, descriptions, problems, ideas, solutions, achievements, results, and creative team members. It’s worth its weight in gold to every creative, especially for younger people. Where else can you see how 134 briefs turned into 134 award winning campaigns, all in one place?
Anyway, Creative Portfolio is No1.
The following three of the greatest things that happened to us this year are Mercator Slovenia, Konzum BiH and Sarajevski Kiseljak (it just hit me that all three are part of Agrokor). And all three can be summarized under one thing: all of them enabled us to report on their TV spots simultaneously as the campaigns launched, and Konzum and Sarajevski kiseljak even invited us to the set during the filming, allowing us to publish texts and photos from the shooting immediately next day – two or three months before the campaigns were even supposed to roll out. After seven years of asking, begging, anger and fury, three advertisers finally appeared, who do not hide their work from the public, and three agencies who do not mystify their business and don’t send us news about their campaigns only after they gathered hundreds of thousands of YouTube views: Vuga+, the agency that runs the communication of Mercator, Konzum’s agency Communis, and Fabrika, a long-term partner of Sarajevski kiseljak. Kudos to the agencies, but I must point out that we received these campaigns so timely thanks to the advertisers who wanted it – thanks to Viktorija Radojević Mavrič, Mercator’s marketing director, Sabina Suljović, Haris Arnautović and Selma Ovčina from Konzum, and Davor Čičić from Sarajevski kiseljak.
A paradox has happened. I’ve spent years persuading agencies that we are a daily portal, and that a campaign that launched a month ago is not current news for us. We don’t need it after it was seen by 150,000 people on YouTube. We received about twenty such news, when agencies remembered us only as a channel to boast their YouTube views. Whenever I asked them to send us their campaigns within 24 hours, all of them, as a rule, refused it, giving excuses that they need to wait for a consent from the client, which lasts at least seven days. Then I asked them to make arrangements with the client during the shooting of the campaign, to send a short article and video to Media Marketing a day after the campaign launches (even then it is seen by hundreds of thousands of television viewers and social network users). Even this was a no-go. Now, when I compare them with Vuga, Communis Sarajevo and Fabrika, I realize that those agencies have no guts, and you can’t do this job without that. They disillusion themselves, and us in the process, they mystify the creative and production processes in advertising as if it were a secret expedition to Mars. Only when they receive an award at a festival they send press releases in the middle of the night. And then they hold it against us for not singling out their awards and publishing their own press release after we’ve already published a full summary of winners, because “it would mean a lot” to them.
And here’s how Mercator and Vuga+, Konzum and Communis Sarajevo, and Sarajevski kiseljak and Fabrika, treated us, and you our dear readers.
Mercator created the 2 Cellos campaign this summer. A world exclusive. One Sunday evening, at the same time as the broadcasting of the spot started on Slovenian TV stations, we received a press release and the video from Mercator. I couldn’t believe it. Finally, somebody figured out what we were doing. The ice had started to give. I immediately forwarded the text to Adnan to translate it to English and the news was published around 22.00hrs on a Sunday evening. Minutes after it was in the inboxes of nearly six thousand professionals from the regional advertising industry on our mailing list. It was one of the most read breaking news this year! Of course, there were those who protested. One creative wrote to us that, if we ever send him an e-mail this late on a Sunday evening, he would unsubscribe from our newsletter. It happened several times since that Mercator sent us the news the same moment as the campaign started, including the latest Christmas one.
Thank you Mercator, Viktorija Radojević Mavrić and her entire team, because they first recognized why we exist.
Konzum BiH, along with Communis Sarajevo, twice invited us to the filming set of their campaigns, and both times they agreed that we release the report from the set immediately the next day. This happened for the first time in seven years. They weren’t hiding what they were doing, although both times the campaigns were planned to launch two months after the shooting! Everyone else just say that a campaign is a business secret until it’s live. For Konzum, it’s not so. Why? Because they have the guts, and because they believe in what they are doing.
Fabrika agency and Sarajevski kiseljak invited me in September to spend one day in Bjelašnica at the recording of their new spot with Rade Šerbedžija. It was on one of the most beautiful days of this year. During the shooting, I asked Davor Čičić, Director of Sales, Marketing and Development of Sarajevski kiseljak, and Jasna Mikačić, Advisor for Marketing in Agrokor, if I could publish a Diary log from the set? Davor replied that I was free to write all that I saw and heard there, and that in December I would be the first one notified when the campaign launches. And indeed, they came through a couple of days ago. I sent Davor five questions about the campaign and co-operation with Šerbedžija. Davor quickly sent the answers and the spot. We published everything on the campaign start date, once again an exclusive. This was also a first-off in the past seven years for us.
To summarize: Mercator sent us a 2 Cellos campaign at the same time as it launched on Slovenian TV stations, Konzum was the first company to invite us to the filming of their videos and allowed us to share our impressions the very next day, Sarajevski kiseljak made it possible for us to have a world premiere of a spot with Hollywood actor Rade Šerbedžija.
Talk about good things…
