Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
Tomorrow, Tuesday 9 May, we will revive the Art&Business portal, as a special edition of Media Marketing on Tuesdays. On Thursday we issue the special edition Woman.Comm. This means that the Media Marketing will roll out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. In order to maintain continuity of current news, both Art&Business and Woman.Comm will retain the 24 Hours section featuring news from the advertising industry in the region and the world.
Anyway, since the Art&Business will be coming out tomorrow, for which the Diary of a Methuselah is not appropriate content, I am publishing it today. What does it matter if it’s today or tomorrow? It matters, because tomorrow, 9 May, it’s my 67th birthday (I’m the same age as the EU). I write this not to announce it, but for entirely practical reasons. Out of these 67 years of life, I’ve spent a full 47 years in advertising and promotion, marketing communications, integrated communication or whatever the name was of the jobs I did. That’s how many years of service are registered in my labor card, which I never intend to close – that’s how long I’ll be working. I’ll stop when I leave this world, because, as they say here, you can somehow survive everything in Sarajevo except death.
And even if I was announcing my birthday, it would be quite natural at my age, when birthdays are becoming scarcer, so you look forward to each one a lot more than you did when you were young, and when birthdays just flew by.
In preparation for this birthday, I’ve spent days rewinding the film in my head, recalling some important events and landmark moments in my life. And since out of the 67 years, 47 of them were in working life, most of the things that came to mind were work related. For the first time I tried to compare how I did certain things 47 years ago, and how I would do the same things today.
I’ve been working since I can remember things, although there was no need for that, especially not during schooling. I lived in a well-off family, so I worked because I love to work. For example, three years of my high school I worked as a morning paper boy. I would get up at 3.30h and go to the print house of Oslobodjenje to pick up a bag full of newspapers. Come rain or snow, I would deliver the newspaper until half past seven, and then went straight to school. Today, I do the same thing in the media business. MailChimp delivers all over the world in just half a minute, to a few hundred times more addresses.
When I got a job at Radio Sarajevo, my first task was to go to the company Čajavec in Banja Luka and conclude the annual advertising contract for the radio program. What hasn’t changed in these 47 years is the fact that in the management of football clubs there have always been, and still are, successful directors whose task is to find money for the club. Since my first boss, Mirko Kamenjašević, came to the propaganda program from the sports desk, he knew all the board members of football clubs who came from the business sector. He made a deal with Isko Brkić, director of Čajevec and president of the club Borac from Banja Luka, to establish cooperation. The only thing that was left to do was for the “boy” to go to Banja Luka and finish the job. Čajavec was then one of the largest manufacturers of TV sets, radios and other electronic devices. I got the orders from the boss around noon, and already in three hours I was on the train to Banja Luka, thinking up the story I would sell tomorrow. Of course I was nervous, but director’s warm welcome infused courage in me. I told him how I saw our cooperation. He accepted all the proposals and said which products they would like to advertise. I asked him for a new meeting in two hours. I went to the hotel, where I slept the previous night, picked up a typewriter from the reception desk – the famous Biserica – and wrote a few advertising texts in my room. When I went back to Brkić, he looked at the texts and was very pleased. I asked him to meet again in two hours. I went to the hotel, again took the typewriter and in my room typed out the finalized agreement with the time schedule of broadcasting. Everything was accepted, we signed the deal and I was happy. I had contracted at least three times larger budget than my boss could have imagined. When I appeared at work in the morning, Mirko asked me with a slightly raised voice: “What, you haven’t gone to Banja Luka yet?” I handed him the contract. He looked at it almost incredulously.
Today, I would finish all that with the e-mail, without even stepping out of the office. I’d even be able to record the ads in the studio, and send them via e-mail as well, so the impression would be even more striking.
When I began to work, there was a great lack of liquidity in the economy – bills were being paid with several months of delay, and compensations were a widespread practice. Since my credo is that money is not earned until it’s charged (or spent, whatever, as long as I got it), I did compensations every few months. It meant I would take the book with compensation notices from our finance department, and hit the road. I didn’t even know where I would be travelling, or how long I would be staying there. I only knew the first stop and nothing more. For example, OZEHA from Zagreb owed us a large amount for Pepsi. I go to Zagreb, we compare the invoices and they say the situation is OK, but they don’t have the money to pay us because Varteks in Varaždin owes them a large amount of money. In my Book of Compensations they certify they agree that we collect the money from Varteks. Then I go to Varaždin, and everything goes the same as in OZEHA, but they say that a department store in Skopje owes them, and they transfer their debt to them. I take a bus from Varaždin to Zagreb, then a train to Skopje and round and round I go until I find someone whom we owe, so I could close the compensation. Along the way new jobs were agreed, and other compensations closed as well. On average each such journey lasted 10 to 15 days.
Today, the claims are reported to specialized agencies, and multilateral compensations between several thousand business entities are performed in a matter of minutes.
Today I have at my disposal hundreds of apps that can facilitate my life and work, but I don’t like them. I think they make idiots out of people, and that in a few years young people won’t even know the right time for toilet if their app, on the basis of an analysis of what and how much they ate, and the analysis of time it takes to process that food into useful and useless elements, says it’s time to visit the restroom. Still, I took one of such gadgets. My son Filip a few days ago brought me a bracelet from Portugal that measures the crossed steps and all other movements, including turning in sleep. It sends all that information to the app that I installed on my phone. I’ve been using it for two days. Yesterday, my phone chimed to praise me for making more steps than planned.
When I started working – the first ten, fifteen years, until the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984 – in order to get a telephone connection with a city in Bosnia it took several attempts (up to half an hour) of dialing the number because the communication needs of people were higher than the bandwidth of telephone lines. It took the Olympic Games to create conditions for normal functioning of the telecommunications system. When you were out of office or home, you were out of communication. Today, a cell phone is constantly in my pocket. If I call someone, and they don’t answer because they’re in a meeting for example, I send them a text or an email, and communication has been established in an instant.
Everything is much easier today, but sometimes I wish I could go back to “those times”, times when there was more humanity in our communication, when we mostly communicated face to face, with heart and soul.