By: Boštjan Prijanovič, director of New Moment Y&R Ljubljana, founder of marketing school BP Komunikacije and member of the board of the Slovenian Advertising Agencies’ Association
Louis XV is to blame for everything.
You know the guy. He’s the guy whose great-grandfather was his namesake, Louis XIV. The Sun King. “L’Etat, c’est moi.” A guy with a pumped-up ego. As a rule, the posterity of such persons makes it hard to live up to expectations. Thus, Louis XV, true to tradition, went on the path of failing his elders’ expectations. He brought his country to the brink of revolution and thus totally screwed up his grandson, the sixteenth of the Louises. But as far as we are concerned, most interesting are his wars with the English, all of which he lost. That is why North America is an English-speaking territory today (except for a small enclave in Canada).
As a result of this (not to go into over a century of history in detail), the English language has become the global language of technology, art and, of course, advertising.
All the better for us. Somehow it’s easier to search for the TH sound with my tongue on my palate than to try to utter the R in French, without having it sound like an actual R.
We started ‘learning’ advertising in the early nineties. After the collapse of socialist communism and the arrival of beloved capitalism. However, we had had a kind of propaganda even before, but new is always better, and everything that comes from the West is definitely better. Even know-how came to us in an English word. Advertising, rating, target group, goals, budget, creative director (and a host of other directors), brand, content… and then there are the super sexy abbreviations: GRP, CPS, TG, TRP, AIDA, YTD, KPI, B2B, B2C, CMS, CRM, CTR, ROI, WOM, SEO, RTM, PPC… I don’t know how we were able to even exist before.
In the agencies, we immediately took over the English dictionary and passed it on to our clients.
Of course, nothing in our region goes smoothly if it overly intrudes into language. Our language. The Slovenian language, or the language of any other state that emerged from the broken cradle called Yugoslavia. “Our language” is THE ONLY PHRASE that has preserved us in our thousand year history of subjugation under foreign masters. It is therefore sacred and we must not neglect it.
So we translated the entire advertising profession into Slovenian. At meetings, I always had to excuse myself for using a foreign word, an English term for an advertising element that has exactly the same meaning in Slovenian. And even then I had to be careful to note it’s in English because English was not a “grammatically acceptable form”.
The problem is that in the meantime the whole world has become a global village. And this global village interacts in English. This is the environment in which advertising is changing and evolving, and everything new again comes to us in English.
At the same time what has happened in the region is that Slovenian youth no longer understand Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian! Not to mention Macedonian.
English is thus no longer just a global language, it has become our regional language.
Ekrem has foreseen this. Media Marketing stands for Balkan creativity in English.
