Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović, ekrem@www.media-marketing.com
“George Soros has a tendency to donate a million dollars to people he invites to lunch. Maybe he’ll invite you to lunch tomorrow,” Muhamed Sacirbey, Head of the BiH Mission to the UN in New York and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, once said to me, while we were walking the golf course in Crans Montana, waiting for the philanthropist George Soros – who was receiving a special award from the Crans Montana Forum for his contributions to Bosnia that evening – to join us. Back then I was publishing the Business Magazine. I printed it in Ljubljana and slipped it into Sarajevo through the Tunnel. It looked “worldly”. This was in June 1995. When I found out that Soros was going to receive an award, I decided to go to Crans Montana to see if I could get a donation of $60,000, which is how much I needed to pay for the Reuters’ business service. I figured I’d definitely get it. It’s not big bucks, and the mission of the magazine was consistent with his ideas about the reconstruction and development of the BiH economy after the war. I was just wondering whether he would immediately pull $60k out of his pocket, or withdraw it with a card or – the worst case scenario – write a check that I would be able to cash in immediately.
When Soros joined us, Muhamed introduced me, showed him the Business Magazine, briefly explained what I wanted and explained the arguments as to why he should help me. Soros took the magazine, flipped through it, and just as I was waiting for him to put his hand into the pocket, he said, without blinking: “This is not a realistic magazine for Bosnia. It’s too luxurious, and I will not support this.” At that moment, Almir Begović-Bega, Minister Sacirbey’s companion, grabbed him by the lapels and shouted: “And what do you want? For us to cut our faces with a razor blade to make us look worse than we are?” and pushed him away.
I remembered this on Tuesday while I was driving in a cab through Zagreb, from Agrokor – after hanging out with Iva Balent (I deliberately won’t call it a meeting) – to the Hotel Esplanade for a coffee with my dear friend Ksenija Renko. This is my usual ritual when I leave Zagreb. A coffee with Ksenija at the Esplanade. I didn’t get invited by Soros to a “million dollars lunch”, but between last Sunday and Tuesday, I had three meetings and one lunch, each of which lasted exactly two hours, so I’ve dubbed them the “two-hour meetings”. At these meetings, in an intangible (and a little bit in a tangible) sense, I received more than anything promised by Soros’ million dollars lunch.
Let’s go chronologically.
Vedrana – my life partner and companion on all my travels – and I went to Belgrade on Sunday morning. We took a detour via Novi Sad to take our son Filip and his friends Boško and Jelena, with whom he is staying during the Exit festival, to lunch.
In the evening I had a meeting in Belgrade with Milena Garfield. It was the first of the four two-hour meetings. She had flown in with her daughter from Washington and was going to the seaside in Herceg Novi. Every year I somehow see people off to the seaside. Last year, when she and Bob (Bob Garfield, the famous columnist for Advertising Age) were going on holiday to Greece, all three of us spent a good part of the morning sipping coffees and cold lemonades in a Belgrade café.
Milena and I are friends, and she is worth her weight in gold for me for the Art&Business portal. Milena knows everything about Arts Management and writes excellent columns for us. This time our main topic was the Art&Business Conference on Sponsorship in Culture and Art that we are organizing for early November at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. I exchanged ideas With Milena about the program and participants in the program. She suggested Ulix Fehmiu (New York) and a few other famous names that could attract the audience to the conference. I asked her to think about some other things as well while she’s at the seaside, and suggested that we meet again after her vacation to put it all together.
Monday morning started with a coffee with Boro Miljanović (Represent Communications) at the Choco café. We shared the latest information about his agency and our portal, and moved on to the projects that Bora is planning for the autumn and the beginning of next year. At the beginning of October (3rd and 4th) he will organize a conference on Digital and Content marketing. From 1 November to the end of the year they will have the Content Academy. Next year’s big projects will kick off from 1st of February – with the LSPR school of public relations, which will last two months. I promised that we will be media sponsors for all these events. We highly appreciate what Boro does. I’m glad that after the difficult crisis Represent went through, much better times have come, and we want to be a part of their success. An excellent first morning coffee.
I grabbed a cab to New Belgrade, to Leo Burnett, to meet with Miša Lukić. The second in a series of two-hour meetings. Long time no see. We’re friends, and there are so many things we want to tell each other. Of course, I wanted to know everything that’s happened to Miša in the past four months since he became one of the five CEOs of Publicis One in the world. When he took over the responsibility, he was assigned 17 markets. Now it’s 30! That’s a great thing for us. All that is being noticed somewhere. A man from Belgrade, from the Adriatic region. That means points for the entire industry. In each market there will now be only one agency, where there were more before. All this consolidation leads to progress, but it also demands sacrifices. The number of executives is being reduced, and that’s been the hard part of Miša’s job over these past few months. Otherwise he is very happy. He is proud of how many good people Publicis has in every market, how creative the agencies are, and how strong they are in the services they provide to their clients. We talked about many things, but there’s so much I want to tell you about in this diary entry that I just can’t write about everything. We haven’t even touched upon our cooperation under the new circumstances, nor the big interview that Miša promised to give to Media Marketing first. Sonja Dragojević, Miša’s right hand, was there throughout the meeting, and the meeting ended with Miša saying: “Sonja, write this down. Ekrem is coming to us in the first week of August to discuss all the details of our cooperation.” After these words he got on a plane and flew off to Kiev. Over the last four months he’s been constantly on planes and in Skype conferences.
After Miša, I rushed to a meeting with Alex Đorđević from the SuperStar Worldwide agency, who is helping us organize the AD Woman of the Year ceremony which we are planning for 17 November in Belgrade. Alex traditionally organizes the Days of Luxury in Belgrade in September, and we would like some of these prestigious global brands to sponsor AD Woman. We talked about the concept of the ceremony. Alex has a lot of experience and is very creative in designing events.
We got into a car and Alex drove me to Dedinje, to the Grafičar restaurant for lunch with Srđan Šaper. It wasn’t a million dollars lunch, but every meeting and discussion with Srđan means a lot to me. As an appetizer, we talked about finally getting the news about the takeover of all four of the McCann World Group agencies in Scandinavia the following day. The green light had come from New York for the news to be published. I was very happy that we would get the news first, and that we would be able to publish it as breaking news (by now you have all already received it and read it). Because of this news, I’m writing the diary a day late, because if I’d written it yesterday, I wouldn’t be able to mention this. And this is huge for our regional industry. A man from Belgrade, from the Adriatic region, taking over the whole of Scandinavia. This shows that we’re worth something. If big advertisers and agencies look at us suspiciously because they think we’re small and undeveloped, we’ll take them on now, on their own turf, and see who’s better. I really like Srđan’s reasoning for doing this, and the fact that the agencies will be managed by Richard Bonner-Davies. I will skip the main course, as per our agreement. For dessert, we talked about the twentieth anniversary of Srđan’s cooperation with McCann, which falls next year. Over these twenty years, Srđan has succeeded in creating a communications system in 12 countries, now including Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden, which joined recently. It was a very pleasant and useful conversation.
I fired up the car and we sped off to Zagreb. Around half past nine, at the entrance to the city, I was just telling Vedrana how I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel and just crash into bed, when my phone rang. It was Vlatko Dimovski, regional director of the McCann agencies. He said that he and Mario (Mario Fraculj, CEO of McCann Zagreb) were still at the agency. He asked how far away I was. I said I’d be at the Sheraton in twenty minutes. “We’re coming for you,” he said and hung up. We had a dinner that lasted three hours, so it doesn’t belong in this series of two-hour meetings. It was very relaxing. We had a great evening. These are the things I love about my job. I told them all about my talks with Srđan, except for the main course, which in any case is not for them. This was the first time I had hung out at length with Mario and got to know him a little bit better. Everything people told me about him is true. A great guy.
Tuesday morning. Coffee with Marina Bolanča (Abeceda komunikacije). We talked about two things. The first was the promotion of the book The Best of Creative Directors that we are planning for mid-September in Zagreb. Abeceda will organize the event for us. Marina proposed the restaurant Dubravkin Put. Later that day I would check out this idea with Ksenija Renko, who is the undisputed supervisor of everything that I do in Zagreb; Ksenija said it was a great idea. Second, Abeceda is our partner in the organization of the Art&Business Conference. I informed Marina about my conversation with Milena Garfield, and she told me about her conversations with the Museum of Contemporary Art. This project is developing well.
We sat in the car and Marina drove me to Agrokor’s skyscraper for the long-awaited meeting with Iva Balent. I hadn’t actually waited for this meeting for a long time, but I had wanted it for a long time. When the two Saatchi brothers noted, over dinner in London, that their agency Saatchi&Saatchi was the strongest in the UK, the elder brother said: “In order to claim that, we have to win the biggest client in the UK.” That was traditionally British Railways. Dragan Sakan always used to open his talks about creativity with the story about how the brothers Saatchi greeted the management of the railways at their first meeting. In the same way, I now tell my associates: “In order to prove that we are the most significant medium of the regional communications industry, we have to build close relationships with the market leaders.” If I&F McCann is a leader among agencies, then Agrokor is certainly the leader among advertisers. That’s why this meeting with Iva Balent was so important to me.
I had heard different things about Ms. Balent from my friends. The first bits of information that I started getting from some of the agencies a year or two ago was that she is “tough” with money. OK, I thought, this is proof that she has a large budget, because she wouldn’t have such a large budget if she wasn’t like that. It’s only the penniless who are careless with a thousand euros. A big shot weighs things carefully before spending anything. That’s why they’re the big shots. Others told me very nice things, and at the forefront of these was Zvezdana Žujo. “You’ll see, Iva is a wonderful woman, when you hear her laugh it’ll all come clear. She’s very easy to communicate with. She’s really great, you’ll see.” Of these two camps I decided to side with Zvezdana. I’ve known her for almost twenty years and I have undying trust in her.
I arrived at the Agrokor skyscraper. They directed me to the lounge on the 21st floor. When I entered I saw that it is totally similar to another lounge which was also located on the 21st floor, but in PanAm’s skyscraper in New York, where, in 1983, I was received by Ivan Deželić, originally from Korčula, and the then Global Sales Director of Pan American, whom I interviewed for Radio Sarajevo about sponsorship of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984.
An incredible similarity with everything, including my mood before that meeting in 1984 and this one, 33 years later. Immediately upon Ms. Balent’s entry into the lounge our ‘meeting’ lost the form of a meeting and became a pleasant social chat about everything and anything, with next to nothing relating to work. The ‘work’ was all contained in Iva’s final sentence, which she uttered as we shook hands goodbye. “Anything that you think might be beneficial for you and for us, write it all down for me and send me a proposal.” This was all that was said about work. Why? I guess I was supposed to pose this question, but our conversation was such that work didn’t even cross my mind. After all, what does it mean to talk about work in my line of work? To talk about money for advertisements and sponsorships which is the first (or almost exclusive) interest of any media? Perhaps this is also something in which we are completely different from the rest – it comes to us spontaneously, as a result of good cooperation. Almost all of my interests were covered after Iva’s first few sentences when she said she would send us a mailing list of all her associates in marketing because she wants our newsletter to come to them every morning, so that people would be informed about what is going on in our industry.
“There’s about five hundred of us in the marketing of all Agrokor’s brands and I would like everyone to read Media Marketing. In the morning when I come to work I am greeted with the reports of press clipping agencies and the Media Marketing newsletter. I read the newsletter, and the clipping report is prepared for me by my associates.” And that’s it! In our very first contact Iva understood what I have struggled for five years to explain to agencies and advertisers. We’ll get five hundred potential readers, our visits will increase, and hence advertising revenue – the bigger our readership, the more interesting we are to advertisers. Here, for example, the information that as of today we will be read by 478 marketing people in Agrokor (Iva has already sent me the mailing list, so I know how many there are ), is excellent information for advertising and other agencies – advertise on Media Marketing and all Agrokor marketers will know about you. We offer one of the most effective channels to the region’s biggest advertiser, where all the marketers will know everything about what you do. From my standpoint the work part of the meeting was successfully finished in the third minute of our conversation. The remaining 117 minutes we spent talking about a variety of other topics.
We started with the inevitable Cannes Lion, which was won by Jana, and wrapped up with the Sarajevo Film Festival, which came into focus because of Agrokor’s interest in Konzum. I also talked with Iva about the big projects we are working on right now (the books, AdWoman and Art&Business Conference), about our plans with the portal Art&Business, which she didn’t even know existed (Iva, Art&Business portal is at www.artbizmag.com, and also take a look at our third portal at www.media-marketing.events). Good thing I brought her a gift of a set of four CDs with the recordings of the 27 best young Slovenian pianists whom we have sponsored through funds collected from the Friends of Young Artists. This set of CDs (I got it the day before my departure), a booklet about the young pianists, the With Compliments Card and the box in which Mitja Petrovič packed it all in, look so good, that one might really think that we are a serious publisher. And then the music…
And that’s why I absolutely love the work I do. Because of the privilege of meeting and occasionally hanging out with people like Iva Balent, Srđan Šaper, Miša Lukić, Milena Garfield, Vlatko Dimovski, Mario Fraculj, Marina Bolanča… My job can be done out of pure love during 12 hours a day, which on average is how much I work. It’s well past one hour after midnight. I’m still writing the diary. Adnan is waiting for me to send it to him for translation into English, so he can forward it to Gina to proofread it. Amir is sitting at the computer and waiting for me to send him the list of content for the newsletter, so he can begin to arrange the news on the portal (Bosnian version). We are all awake so you can read this in a couple of hours when the newsletter reaches you. I normally go to bed at ten, because I get up at five. Today, after two days on the road, I was greeted with so much work that I simply couldn’t finish everything earlier. And who knows when I’ll go to sleep – thinking about this article, and whether I wrote everything well, or made it too long because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter…
13 July, 2016.