The industry had no room of its own. So we built one.

No client, no brief. An agency that built the institution and its own industry was missing.

Macedonia's media market is a difficult place to work in: the lowest media literacy ranking in the region, advertising spend of $15 per capita against $30 in Bulgaria, $77 in the Czech Republic and $376 across the EU, with 52 TV broadcasters serving under two million people - far more than Greece, Austria and the Netherlands.

And for all of that fragmentation, not a single gathering place for the professionals inside it. BDG created the Media Innovation Forum to be that place: first in an industrial hangar setting in Skopje in September 2018, then at the DoubleTree by Hilton a year later.

MIF was built on two tracks. The Forum brought together the top people from media, advertising, production companies and content creation to exchange ideas about the now and the tomorrow. The Buyer's Salon gave domestic creatives an alternative marketplace - a route to international buyers that didn't exist before.

In 2019 the event drew 214 attendee applications for 112 places and 46 pitcher applications for 10 slots, generated a great deal of media attention including features in the central news of major broadcasters, and put more than ten pitcher-buyer negotiations in motion within the first week afterwards.