Maxim Behar for Manager: The Most Important Year in Business is Upcoming, The Year to ‘Adjust’

The communication expert Maxim Behar shares in an interview for Manager magazine what are the most important elements in the PR profession, what role traditional and social media play today, how to use them successfully and what challenges do experts face in Bulgaria.

What does a good creative message mean from the point of view of your business?
In our business, PR creativity is everything. There are a number of additional, some of them extremely important, elements, but without creativity, without an interesting and clear message, all our work will remain solely on paper… This question completely corresponds to my understanding of PR - to tell the truth so that it can be well understood. The first part – truth, is undoubtedly the most important one; however, the second one contains the creative part, a message which to be developed in such a way that it can be understood by anyone… This is exactly what good, true creativity means. Very short messages need to be used, any word should be well considered, even each comma, to decide where to put the verb, how dynamic it should be … and what matters the most – to know that each media has its unique language. We all write either in Bulgarian or in English, but the language of Facebook is one kind, that of Twitter another one, the language of Linkedln is more business-oriented, that of Instagram - with very little text and great vision, that of Tik Tok is the most complicated one, because an original and super interesting video must say in 15 seconds what we said only five years ago for half an hour…

What was the nature of the stories you told in 2021 with your clients? In what type of communications did you predominantly invest?
We tried to be correct and creative. We perfectly accomplished it with all our projects, which can be easily proved by the clear results as well as the opinion of our clients. What matters the most is that we used all possible social media, in order to find the most suitable mix for our messages and depending on what we want to accomplish. We told real life stories about young people and not that young, people with great opportunities and for a small circle of professionals, we talked about changes in Bulgaria and how the pandemic changed our whole life and our attitudes to goods and services for ever. However, on the other hand, we did not underestimate traditional media, which also have their impact on audiences and fortunately the already paid content in them is quite well regulated and signified – thus we achieve the use of one of the most important, not to mention the most important element in our business - ethics. Readers know that this is a sponsored content, a way for the client to send important messages to them.

What are the crucial challenges communication departments of companies in Bulgaria face?
To adjust quickly to the entirely new conditions of doing business, as the pandemic is not the only reason. On a global scale, there is one constant tendency, quite accelerated by the pandemic, which cannot pass by Bulgaria. This is the relatively rapid merger of the three main businesses in the field of public communications - advertising, PR and digital services. There are too many theories about which one is expected to be the leader of this new, big, united and, to a certain extent, quite new business. I have always said at all world forums, where I give speeches almost every month, that it is PR business that will be the leader, as the arguments are obvious to me - we, PR experts, are the ‘kings of content’, and without it every project tends to fail. Now the most important is that any expert in communication business should understand this huge change and begin studying its details. In Bulgaria and around the world.