Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović, ekrem@www.media-marketing.com
The Labor Day coupled with Easter came as a godsend to me, just to ease the everyday tempo and let me dedicate myself to some things that require a little more contemplation and peace.
I started working on the preparation of a book about which I care very much, and which represents one of my favorite projects in recent years. It’s a book about the 20 most successful creative directors of the Adriatic region and the five best creative ideas of each of them. It will be a book with twenty interesting biographies and one hundred great creative ideas. In this manner I will best promote creativity in advertising. The book will be published in ‘our language’ (I don’t know how to call the language in which I write when I write in Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language) and in English. Each creative director will get two introductory pages (a photo and a brief intro), then two bilingual pages of biographical stories and ten pages for the presentation of their top five ideas. Each idea will be presented on two pages, with the brief, the decision and the team that worked on the implementation of the visuals of the campaign. So, it’s fourteen pages per creative director. With the other content, the book will have about 320 pages, in a 230 x 280 mm format. If everything goes as planned, the book should be promoted at Weekend Media Festival, in the framework of BalCannes.
It’s been a year now since I think about this book, but it had to wait for me to finish the translation of the book by Mitja Tuškej, “No Friends, No Brands” from the Slovenian language. Now this book is in the hands of the proofreader and I doubt that we will finish it by the summer (proofreading, layout, printing), so it already seems to me that it would be best if it also first appears at Weekend. I sincerely hope that by then I’ll also finish my book Hotel Yugoslavia, which I permanently thrust aside and have no strength to drop it. But, it’s not unrealistic. If I succeed, we could appear in Rovinj with three very valuable titles. Two books I will sign as an author, and a third as a translator (No Friends, No Brands).
The entire holiday I’ve been making plans and pushing things aside, making space for these books. But plan is one thing, and reality is another. For me it’s always like that, and it always turns out that reality changes plans, sometimes radically. I hope that this time it will not be so, and that I’ve made a good plan to which I will adhere. In the end, it’s always up to me, not the plan. And if it happens (and it will) that Mitja and I promote our books together, then this will be the realization of our original idea. First, we were supposed to do it this last autumn in Sarajevo, during the Direct Media Academy at Jahorina. The second plan was to do it in April at Days of Communication in Rovinj. It seems that fate has decided to have it at Weekend.
The day before the holidays I scheduled meetings in Ljubljana where I will visit on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is reserved for travel and for a very important meeting in Zagreb.
For the two days in Ljubljana I’ve scheduled a dozen meetings associated with the content of Media Marketing and Art & Business portals, our marketing, the final agreement with Mitja about how we will launch the book No Friends, No Brands (a fantastic book), preparation of content for the book about twenty creative directors and some other things. Almost every meeting will be an opportunity to lobby for BalCannes and persuade agencies and advertisers to submit their works and to do so on time. Oh yes, and there’s a very important lunch with Marjan Novak on Thursday, at the Pen Club.
I haven’t only worked for the holidays. I also socialized with Velibor (Veljo) Zolak, governor of Rotary District Serbia and Montenegro, my friend from Budva. Veljo has a holiday house at Pale near Sarajevo, where he came for the holidays. We’ve spent a couple of hours each day talking about the cooperation between the Rotary clubs and Art & Business magazine on lobbying for our young artists and some projects that could soon start. Velibor is very thorough in all his contemplations and never ‘runs ahead of himself’, which is often my problem. That’s why I love to check some things with him, as was now the case with the book about creative directors. He gave me some very useful tips.
We in Bosnia and Herzegovina celebrated the Labor Day holidays for two working days, excluding Sunday. And the Orthodox Easter coincided. That’s how it goes in our rich land of Bosnia. We have holidays like very few countries in the world. Two Eids, two Easters, two Christmases, two different Statehood Days (of BiH and of RS), plus all those holidays that the normal people celebrate (New Year’s Eve, 1 of May, …).
Sarajevo, 3 May, 2016.