This morning I woke up in Belgrade and now I am already sitting at my cosy desk at home again. We are living in a crazy world…

An exciting world really, where Marketing conferences bring you to places that are normally not on the usual travellers’ list. I grew up hearing about wars and all sorts of scary things happening in the former Yugoslavia. But I’m pleased to say Belgrade today is not so far away from the typical European capital, with busy shopping streets, breathtaking churches and beautiful parks – which an odd overpopulation of benches. Speaking of many – coffee houses also seemed to be everywhere. It actually reminded me a little bit of Vienna. And we even spotted a house with Graffiti by the famous Blu, whose work I know from Berlin and Madrid.

Around the two-day event (with more than 250 delegates) the organisers from The P. World arranged some interesting activities that helped us to get to know a little bit more about the country as well as my fellow speakers.

 

So we were given a tour of both of Prince Alexander’s palace’s on separate nights when his daughter Alison explained to us why she needs our support in helping the countries’ marketing and that she would love Serbia to ‘go viral’. According to her, the biggest problem the locals have is Marketing. Export is almost non-existent, so the presentation about Google’s Global Market Finder by Aliza Knox, Google Singapore came in handy.

 

 

My favourite part of the palace tours was the Royal Photographer, Zika Slika, though – a big Kodak fan who is always at the front of the queue at Photokina in Cologne. I will look out for him next year 😉 

The conference itself was held at a beautiful venue – the Studentski Kulturni Centar (SKC) – and opened with a Serbian opera singer – that’s an experience you don’t get at LeWeb!

There I also got to know the great people behind Branding Magazine (Nemanja Veselinović and Aleksandar Đurić). Both were really engaged during the conference. They already published a comprehensive event summary on their page, if you want to know more.

My Belgrade Experience ended with an interesting taxi trip. Our driver Miroslav, (not the soccer player) had quite a few stories to tell about recent years and made me want to read much more about the countries history. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of him…

Enjoy some more Belgrade impressions.