Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
Last week started with our annual internal meeting at the Novotel Bristol Hotel, where I held a three-hour presentation of our projects, with the help of Asja and Malik. Asja presented the Creative Portfolio and several characteristic pages from it, while Malik presented all the good and bad things he found while investigating our existing portal, towards developing a much better page soon.
What he presented was very professionally done. Malik is our new employee who will deal with the portal and our digital development in general. The new site will contain a lot of novelties, will be very modern and in line with the best solutions of similar media in the world.
The meeting (and discussions) was also participated by Zvezdana Žujo, Azra Dedić and Rino Babić from the agency Communis Sarajevo with whom we signed a contract on creative tasks and event management. After the meeting we had a joint lunch, before our internal, Media Marketing meeting, which lasted another two more hours. That afternoon, we promoted Amela Ajanović to Project Manager.
The Creative Portfolio 02 is entering its final stretch. I’ve went through the final draft, and I’m very pleased. We’ve made some changes to the layout in relation to the first book. Somehow it now seems more harmonious and more logical.
Asja and I have made a last-minute call to introduce Slovenia’s Outstanding awards for creative OOH advertising into the Creative Portfolio. This award is awarded by the Europlakat Slovenia for the eighth consecutive year. OOH is an excellent and highly efficient communication channel – a media that, by introducing digital formats, follows trends perhaps even better than other media. Mojca Randl, Director of Formitas and the president of this year’s Outstanding Jury, immediately after the awards sat in her car and travelled to Maastricht, from where she sent me a text message: “I am thrilled with the idea of introducing the Oustanding Awards to the Creative Portfolio. We still have too many bad or average solutions in outdoor advertising. With the inclusion in the Creative Portfolio, a great step forward will be made in showing creatives how to approach this media. Great news!”
The creative portfolio will go out of print in late February. The pre-sales are going great, so I expect the entire circulation of the book will be sold out. The sales are going much better than with the first book. I guess it’s partly because many people have seen the first issue and are now confident that we know how to make an excellent book. A novelty this year is that the book will have its own box, which will look great. All in all, I’m already thankful to Asja, Žare Kerin, Marjan Božić and other members of the team for producing a great book that will give advertising even greater significance and raise creativity to a higher level.
I have been invited to attend Mercator’s strategic conference, which will be held in Ljubljana on Wednesday, February 6th. I planned to stay in Sarajevo for two or three weeks and travel nowhere, but I couldn’t refuse invitation from Viktorija Radojević Mavrič. On the way to Ljubljana, Vedrana and I will go to Zagreb for dinner with Dr. Ivo Belan and his wife. Dr. Belan deals with medical publications and runs a marathon, although he is over 80 years of age. I look forward to meeting him.
On Friday, I first had a coffee and cake at Torte i to, with Ena Maglić, CEO of the PR agency Represent Communications in Sarajevo. We talked about the London School of Public Relations (LSPR) that the Represent is launching in Sarajevo. This is something we were lacking, and we want to fully support this project. I registered Amela, our project manager, to attend, because I think her knowledge acquired in LSPR will be very useful for project organization.
Ena is a very pleasant interlocutor. She knows a great deal about public relations, is very positive and I’m sure Bora Miljanović made an excellent choice when she entrusted her the development of the agency in Sarajevo. I also received a great gift from Ena. An original of one of the old cartoons by the famous Sarajevo cartoonist of Božo Ninković, Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow. Yesterday we read the newspapers, today we watch television, and tomorrow we will read portals on portable computers. I immediately took the framed cartoon to the office and put it on the wall. We are the TOMORROW part, hopefully. ?
Talks about PR continue with Ilarija Bašić from MITA Group, with whom I had a lunch arranged at the Four Seasons restaurant. Ilarija and I have a lunch together every two months, where we talk about a variety of topics – a little about the work, a little about Krajina (we are both connected to the river Una, on which we both grew up). Every conversation with Ilarija is useful to me, since it allows me to keep my touch with the PR.
On Saturday we were to have a celebratory lunch on the occasion of Asja’s birthday. We bought her a new iMac. I went to Apple reseller early in the morning, to pick up the computer which they packed flawlessly, as I asked them the day before. I brought it to the restaurant before the lunch.
The entire family was at the lunch. After the desert, I brought out the present. I achieved what I wanted. Everyone was surprised and it really looked like a birthday.
On Sunday morning, Tilda Bogdanović from Dubrovnik called. She is the organizer of Dubrovnik FestiWine in April, and this year we are a partner of the festival. We will organize a one-day conference for winemakers from across the region, where creative directors of several agencies will present the design of labels and campaigns they did for their wine clients.
In addition to the conference, in the atrium of the Sponza Palace at Stradun we will organize an exhibition of the best designed wine labels. Tilda and Ivona Michl were drinking their morning coffee in a Dubrovnik café, and wanted to share some information and questions about the conference and exhibition. Today it’s the Day of St. Blaise, the biggest event in Dubrovnik during the year. It’s raining, and the rain has spoiled the celebration, leaving all the people of Dubrovnik a bit down.
I also received a call from Slovenia. It was Nino Verber, who is organizing Sarajevo Nights of Music (SVEM), in which two concerts especially stand out: the concert of Ivo Pogorelić on May 10, and the concert by tenor Zoran Todorović on May 11th. We are looking for sponsors for SVEM.
This is a great project that we invest a lot of time in, first and foremost out of pleasure, and less out of some business interests. Sponsorship in culture and art is my greatest love, and when you have such artists as Pogorelić and Todorović, the challenge is even bigger. Pogorelić had a concert within SVEM three years ago as well. I will never forget how confused I was before the concert began.
We took our seats 15 minutes before the concert. I saw Pogorelić sitting at the piano in a hoodie, warming up his fingers on the keys. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I’ve been at his concerts before. Last time it was the tailcoat, a butterfly tie, all according to the rules. Now, he was wearing a hoodie. The hall was packed full. The Sarajevo Philharmonic’s musicians came out, starting to finetune their instruments.
Pogorelić was still sitting, playing for himself. I asked Verber what was happening, and he answered me that Pogorelić told him that the piano must be warmed up for the concert, and since he would be performing in the second part of the concert, he was warming it up now. When the conductor came out on stage, Ivo Pogorelić got up and went to his wardrobe. At the beginning of the second part of the concert, he came out again, this time in a tailcoat. A top professional.
February 4, 2019.
