By: Ekrem Dupanović
On Friday morning I woke up early to write the Diary and my impressions from the Direct Media New Era party, because I wanted us to be the first to publish an article about this fantastic event. The night before I arrived by car in Belgrade, I immediately went to the party where I stayed until midnight, so I wasn’t quite in the mood to get up early, but professional obligations are something I always do my best to meet, whenever I can. I asked Adnan to move the newsletter for an hour so I could have the time to write the text. Impressions were still fresh, so it was an easy write.
The first meeting I had was with Aleksandar Seratlić, General Director of SBB. I’m glad I had the opportunity to meet him. The conversation was very nice. I used the opportunity to inform him about our portal and our projects. Both we and the SBB are in a way in the same communications industry, so it was easy for us to understand each other.
From SBB I went to the Kreativa New Formula agency to do an interview with Vera Lloyd-Thomas. I tried to come before the scheduled time, because Vera was to depart for Jerusalem immediately after our meeting.
I knew a lot about the KNF, but while working on this interview I found out a bunch of new things that impressed me. Why, after 20 successful years, Vera has agreed to sell the agency to the Alkemy Digital Enabler group from Milan? How Kreativa has managed to transform and expand the team in a short time to serve Alchemy clients? What are their first experiences? And what does it mean when they say they can guarantee their customers greater business efficiency and better revenue with the use of digital technologies and media? A very interesting chat about something completely new in the communication industry of the region.
Vera left for Jerusalem, and I went to the Franš restaurant for lunch with Ivan Stanković (Communis DDB) and Veran Matić (B92). Ivan has always been a great host, the conversation was very interesting, although there’s little of it that I could tell you about, since most of it was about the everyday events in Serbia with which I’m mostly unfamiliar, so it took quite an effort to follow the story. I don’t know the actors, so that was an additional problem. Mostly, they discussed media reshuffling in Serbia where the media overnight get new owners and where some purchases are done at unrealistically high prices, suggesting that it is not just about business but also about other interests. Whose interests? First and foremost political, so today in Serbia you’d be hard pressed to find a media that doesn’t depend on the interests of some political option – the governing one first and foremost.
For a while now Veran has been busy on improving the sales contract for B92, whose price in the overall arrangement with the purchase of another media has been underestimated, while the overall price of two media is overpriced. It’s no easy job to change something that has already been agreed, but it seems he will be successful in this.
I’m not at liberty to write any more about this, because it’s not for the public, and secondly because I might report wrongly on something that I didn’t understand correctly, because it is all very convoluted.
Anyway, I was glad I had spent two hours with Ivan and Veran and learned some things that are hard to come by for ordinary mortals. Same as some of the things in contacts between Serbia and Croatia, regarding the finding of missing persons, because Veran is Servia’s special emissary in the team for the search for Serbs and Croats missing from the last war.
Belgrade started breathing again after the one-day visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin. While I was driving in taxies, the drivers would tell me all the stories of what they went through the day before. Luckily, the visit lasted only a day.
I went to the Crowne Plaza Beograd to pick up Vedrana, and we head for Sarajevo. Unlike the previous day when Romanija looked divinely under a thick snow cover, bathed in sun, on Friday evening it was quite inhospitable. Heavy snow, slippery road… but once again, with a little help from Halid, everything was manageable.
Sarajevo, January 20, 2019.
