Multilingual Slovenian, working in communications
“I was a snowboarder-punker at school and didn’t look like a person connected to the real staff of the school,” recalled Slovenian Anze Jereb, now the managing partner of the advertising company Industria Communikatsiy (Communication Industry).
“At the time I had the position of a grey cardinal – all social events and concerts the professors had to discuss with me because I was writing a table explaining and advertising various hobbies and my ideas were becoming influential,” he added.
That was how Anze became interested in advertisement and public relations (PR). Later on in university, Anze did some journalism “writing 8,000 characters a week to earn one hundred bucks,” showing him that to become a professional in journalism, he would really need to write as much as possible. After working in glossy magazines, in the International Snowboarding Association, and in an advertising company as a copywriter, he won the official award at the Slovenian Advertising Festival.
Anze came to Ukraine from Slovenia around six years ago, after trying himself first in Serbia, Hungary and Italy. In fact, Anze had to choose between Nairobi, Kyiv and Zagreb. Since he lived too close to Zagreb and too far from Nairobi he chose Kyiv.
According to Anze, in the past several years he learned a lot about Ukrainians, the local history and culture, including Ukrainian and Russian languages, which he didn’t actually study at a language school but started to speak in the process of living and working.
As Anze explained, Slovenia is a multilingual country, where practically everyone speaks Serbian, Croatian, English, German, or Italian: “We speak a lot of languages because we are a small country where everything is built on tourism,” he pointed out. But sometimes at the end of a tough working day, during which Anze speaks the variety of languages, including German and English, he starts to “think in some Russian-Serbo-Slovenian-Ukrainian.”
“I took a 28 hour train ride from Slovenia to Ukraine and people going with me told me that Ukraine is extremely poor, but the first 20 or 40 expensive cars that I saw showed me that Kyiv is not that poor,” Anze recalled. As he stressed, Ukraine is full of crazy money, everything is booming and there’s no actual need for advertisement – staying two years in a line to buy a car means something. There lies the difference between Ukrainian and European ad spheres, the latter being based on competition. For Anze, the biggest problem of working in a Ukrainian environment is the absence of advertising traditions – in the USSR it was nonsense to advertise anything.
As for official issues it’s the same old story – like any ex-pat, Anze is confronted with difficulties while coping with lots of paper work and going through immense lines at banks and other institutions of the kind. Other annoying factors are eternal traffic jams, which, according to Anze, are the result of a mass violation of driving rules, and the absence of parking space in the city that harms both drivers and pedestrians. “Once I worked in Serbia but lived in Slovenia and it took me the same amount of time to get from Slovenia to Serbia as it takes me to reach the [Industria Communikatsiy] office from Dim Mebliv (Druzhby Narodiv metro),” Anze said. However everything is not that gloomy and Anze calls himself an optimist: “In terms of living, Kyiv has become less comfortable but that doesn’t mean it’s less fun living here,” he smiled.
Anze sounded rather optimistic concerning the future of the country as well. He emphasized that “in order to change anything in the country people should first make a change in their own minds. Thus the ‘Orange Revolution’ wasn’t a revolution in the country’s administration but in people’s heads – people understood that they don’t want to live anymore the way they lived before,” he said.
Such a change on a mental level, according to Anze, should also take place in Crimea, where life and ecology are getting worse and worse, taking into account that the peninsula has been a resort for hundreds of years. While the situation in Crimea for of Anze depends first of all on political stability, the future of Ukrainian castles as a tourist attraction can be solved by investments.
Though Anze has spent six years in Ukraine, he isn’t sure whether he will stay here or leave: “My wife is from Ukraine, I’m from Slovenia. Where we will be five years from now I don’t know; we might open a new business in Moscow and I will have to go, so…,” Anze explained.
