EVERY BILLBOARD HAS ITS BUYER

1. “IT’S A DEAL, NO PROBLEM “

My student life was all about studying, going out and part-time jobs that allowed me to earn just enough to be able to buy a return air ticket, travel somewhere and get back to my town. Before I started my family and got a child, travelling had been the meaning of my life. Everything was about where I had been and where else I would go. It was important to me to go somewhere, to have a new experience, to experience new tastes, smells, colours, and to meet people and different cultures.

So far I have visited 31% of the globe, at least Tripadvisor says so. Since the members of my family are even bigger travel enthusiasts than I am, I reckon that I will reach 100% for the rest of my life.

I came to Alma Quattro without any previous plan. My best friend asked me, or better to say, stressed significantly that I should apply for a job as a business secretary in, as she said, “a serious company dealing with billboards“.

“You wandered around the world a lot, it’s time to get serious and start working!“

My answer was: “It’s a deal, no problem”, and I was already thinking that in such a serious company I would also be able to earn for a couple of return air tickets in a short period of time! I went to a job interview in winter 2002, although I had an almost paralysing sinusitis. I managed to get sufficient positive scores and after the interview and one more testing I got a permanent job. Later I found out that there were many very serious candidates for that position, but I was the one who got the job, even though I did not intend to stay there. My first day at work was a day to remember...

On my first day, when I entered the office all dressed up, I walked into a kind of flower festival. There were flowers, decorative plants and various gifts all around. I thought that I missed the right floor. Where am I? Isn’t it a company that rents surface on advertising media? After that Kosanče Dimitrijević, the then CEO, introduced me to other colleagues and explained the situation. All employees were involved in matching gifts with flower arrangements with the professional assistance of a decorator, and the gifts were being prepared for important clients, business partners, company friends. Our guys were taking the gifts with New Year cards to the addresses of gift recipients. I joined them in matching flowers with gifts and my first day at work was like in a florist shop. The following day was something different, all colleagues were at their desks immersed in their work, and I “got serious and started working.“

All in all, 17 years have passed since then and, as you can see, my original plan has changed a bit. I still travel, more than ever, but I am still at Alma and I have no intention of leaving it.

Very soon I realised that I had come to the company where true human values came first, where there was a family atmosphere among colleagues and a friendly relationship with clients.

2. A GERMAN GIRL

The following 6 years I worked as a business secretary, office manager or “German Girl“, which was the nickname I got after a while. I got that nickname because of my organisation skills, precision, responsibility that everything must be done on time, without mistakes, and in the best possible way.

One colleague said that he was afraid every time he heard my footsteps! I mean, I was not a warden to scare people, I only had that attitude. I am joking, of course.

Those years I learnt a lot about various possible and impossible situations at work. I was learning primarily by watching more experienced colleagues.

I was involved, directly or indirectly, in a wide range of business operations, from conventional office tasks to the documentation gathering for major tenders. All business documents passed across my desk and my responsibility was to sort, stamp, deliver for signature, and forward each and every document to relevant persons and to know where the document was at any moment.

The period during which I worked as an office manager was also the period of statutory changes of the company, affiliation of other companies to Alma Quattro, expansion of business activity, starting new projects, and the growth of the company in all respects. Organisation in everyday business operations had to be on a high professional level, and omissions and mistakes were unacceptable. That’s how I mastered and “polished” my skills, disciplined myself, and learnt from the best. The basic element was that there is no such thing as impossible and that there is always a way to solve a problem.

We could say that then I graduated from Alma Quattro classical school.

3. TRAVELLING THROUGH MEDIA PLANNING

During 2008 I moved to the sales department to the position of a media planner.

We worked in two programs: Alariks and Evidenca, and these were one of the best planning systems at that time. However, the sales pace was accelerating and our programs were slow. We could go for a short walk and the program was still working on one location. There was a chaos when a few of us tried to reserve (book) the same location.

On the other hand, we as the employees were happy about every confirmed campaign; there were fewer campaigns, but budgets were incomparably bigger. The atmosphere at work was always fantastic. We were laughing and devising all kinds of shortcuts in order to accelerate our poor programs before we could finally send offers to our clients.

Kosanče Dimitrijević and Sanja Pešić, pioneers and visionaries in this business, realised that the programs were slowing down our work. Therefore, we got the new integrated program Medianet, which we still use successfully.

Media planning in outdoor advertising is not only about booking locations for campaigns, but it also includes many side tasks and duties regarding the complete network of billboards. I often say that our billboards are “living things”, because they change locations within the network, they change positions, one type of media is replaced with another, etc. Sometimes we are forced to make such changes because of street reconstruction, and sometimes as a result of innovations that we are introducing gradually.

Our offer includes over 5000 advertising surfaces in more than 30 cities and towns in Serbia, which means a lot of work for a media planner.

Alma Quattro’s sales team is small, but very efficient. We complement and advise one another, we discuss the strategy and try to find the best possible outcome for all parties involved. Outside of work, together with colleagues from other sectors, we also make a good team, successful in everything.

We all have that sense of belonging to Alma Quattro family and that sense drives us to do our best.

However, the essence of our business is to find a buyer for every billboard, and I am convinced that it is possible and that we just need to connect them. We often had clients who wanted to rent one particular billboard, preferably on a major intersection, and thus have a successful campaign. It is our job to help them see the actual picture.

First of all, we do research work on a client, a product, an advertising object, a target group and, of course, the final goal of a campaign. We try to see the big picture and every time we find some locations that are not even considered by clients, and these locations eventually play the key role. A successful campaign is our satisfaction.

That’s why we need to know every medium in detail. We know the “history” of every location and that makes us still unique. In this automated world we still offer a tailor made service.

Having done the media classification, we helped unjustifiably neglected billboards have their renaissance. A media planner is also in charge of direct communication with clients and agencies and, therefore, I am the account of one of the biggest advertisers.

Precision, elaborate marketing strategy, experience and, above all, openness to creativity are the characteristics of this large system that resonated with me and connected us in the long run. Our long-term cooperation is exceptionally successful, to our mutual satisfaction.