By: Ekrem Dupanović
At the beginning of last week I was at the presentation of the Draft Law on Transparency of Media Ownership in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Law on Advertising. The Association of BiH Journalists, the Press Council of BiH and the Media Center, with the support of the European Commission in BiH and the US Embassy, two and a half years ago started preparations of the draft versions of these two laws. During this time, many researches were conducted and numerous conversations were conducted to uncover the actual state of the media and advertising industry. Consultants, advertising experts and media experts collaborated on the project.
Before I went to the presentation I read both pre-drafts of the law. There is still plenty of work to do, especially in the preparation of the Law on Advertising. The pre-draft did not address some of the most important issues of the advertising industry in BiH, which – with the work on these legal documents – is now at the beginning of a long journey.
In the middle of the week I travelled to Belgrade for two days, which I already wrote about in the last Diary.
On Friday, Adnan and I went on a small meetings tour.
The first was in the agency Communis Sarajevo. We sat down with Zvezdana Žujo and her team to go through the sponsorship plans for the project No Limit Sarajevo Advertising Festival, and a list of potential sponsors. The festival will be organized on 21 March next year, in a workshop for the production of the scenery of the National Theater in Sarajevo. We also considered the financial plan. It doesn’t look very good on the expense side. We will have to make quite an effort with sponsors and friends of creativity.
After Communis, we went to lunch with Aldi Halilović from the PromoTim agency, who is working on the Creative Portfolio website. We went through the latest version of the page and discussed corrections. The site should finally be finished in a day or two. Frankly, I’m getting nervous. Everything is taking too long. Soon there will be a new Creative Portfolio out of the presses, and we haven’t finished the first book website. But it will look very good and it will calm me a bit.
After lunch with Aldi, Adnan and I rushed to a meeting with a young developer, whose name cannot be revealed at the time because of the company he is currently working for. We talked about his transition to our team. We need to strengthen our team, we need a developer who will work on the technical development of the portal and digitize the projects we are going to implement in the next year. I’m happy with the talks and I think we will soon get an associate we’ve needed for a long year now.
From this meeting I went to the Hotel Evropa for dinner with all participants in the drafting of the Law on Transparency of Media Ownership and the Law on Advertising. It was an opportunity to talk to my friends in a relaxed atmosphere. We haven’t gotten together in one place for such a long time. We exchanged ideas and talked about what needs to be done to help the media and the advertising industry to get two quality laws.
I went back to Evropa on Sunday morning. A three-hour meeting with Kemal Koštrebić, who started working on arranging our mailing lists, and creating a database on the regional advertising industry that could be our little treasure. Kemal made the database for the Creative Portfolio 02, and showed me how to pull data using certain keywords. It works perfectly. On this model we will create a general database design that will cover all of our projects. The foundation will be a mailing list of nearly six thousand addresses to which we send our morning newsletters. A lot of work awaits us. Much needs to be sorted and refined. We didn’t touch our mailing lists in three years. Some of the mail addresses have certainly changed in the meantime, we need to find these people again and get their new addresses. Kemal and I are counting that the whole project could be completed by the end of March next year. In a couple of days, our team will be joined by Amela Ajanović, who should help us administer the database of all the information we have.
On Monday evening I was a guest on a one-hour show on Hayat TV together with Borka Rudić, director of the Association of BiH Journalists and Elvir Švrakić, president of the Media Industry Association. We talked about the above said laws, we defined the main issues that stand in the way of development of these industries, we tried to find the most optimal solutions. We mostly find that the situation in the media industry is catastrophic, and that it is not much better in advertising as well. Advertiser budgets are constantly declining, advertising cake is shrinking each year. Total turnover in the advertising industry of Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently less than the turnover of MediaCom Zagreb media agency.
I’m answering a lot of holiday greetings and trying to send good vibes to all good friends. I feel great in these pre-New Year days. I send most of my messages to Croatia and Slovenia, to friends who celebrate Christmas.
Sarajevo, December 26, 2018
