d:istinkt - Executive of the Year - Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations
Company: d:istinkt, Sofia, Bulgaria
Company Description: d:istinkt is an award-winning integrated communications and experience agency located in Sofia, Bulgaria. The agency specializes in corporate communications, digital media, creative, brand consulting, media strategies and exposure campaigns.
Nomination Category: Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Executive of the Year - Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations
Nomination Title: Boyan Ivanovich
Boyan Ivanovich is currently the CEO of one of the biggest PR agencies in Bulgaria - d:istinkt. Only at 30 years of age, he has led transformations across a range of businesses and is one of the founders of the tech outlet Smart News Bulgaria and CRAVE - a concept-to-video agency.
Boyan is the main driver behind the major transition of d:istinkt from an agency with a traditional model to a creative agency focusing on the future. He took over the agency’s leadership in 2019, heading a business that had lost its focus and with an unsatisfactory market share.
In just two years the agency recorded impressive growth - 55.6% revenue increase during the first year, followed by full rebrand in the second year which is poised to drive the agency’s growth even further. In 2020 the company also managed to climb the 7th spot in Capital's annual PR agencies ranking, a significant success from being ranked 17th in 2019.
The value of this distinctive skill set became apparent early on in his career – only 2 months after joining d:istinkt he was already redefining both internal and client-side processes and was providing analytics and advice to large accounts in the field of corporate reputation and public affairs.
Background
Boyan is a media strategist holding a PhD in Media Theory from Sofia University. His Master’s degree is in PR while his bachelor's in journalism.His career is focused on analytics, public relations and media. Boyan’s past work experience includes Media Analyst at Perceptica, Media Consultant for Netflix, Editor in Chief of Smart News Bulgaria, Tech Editor at HiComm and Journalist for 24chasa newspaper among others.
Agency life
Shareholders invited him with a simple task: transform the agency into a leading PR powerhouse and gain back the lost market share, reputation and business. After fully restructuring the agency to better answer professional challenges, promoting people and increasing the responsibility every employee bears, empowering them to take the charge and truly believe it is up to them to achieve success, he quickly gained the trust of employees and partners. This led to people taking charge and celebrating every success and new client together, knowing well that their own success equals the agency success.
Transformational changes
Boyan is obsessed with quality. He believes every single piece coming out of the agency has to carry top-notch quality - from the email, to the tone of voice when talking to clients to strategies, creative and visuals. This is why he believed that change should come from inside. He believes project management is crucial to every campaign. The restructuring process also involved moving all agency content, communication and project management to the cloud, making the office available to everyone, anywhere.
He hired a dedicated creative team focused only on the artistic representation of communication products. Believing quality attracts clients and armed with one of the best designers and creative minds in Bulgaria, we actively started promoting the new agency acquisitions (key creative content) and upselling current clients.
This in turn led to serious increase in workload and number of orders out of traditional PR billings, further strengthening revenue.
Boyan led the rebranding of Intelday Solutions (now d:istinkt) as an internal project. The visual representation of every agency aspect was another key focus in this project as we all know how people judge the book (how do we expect someone to handle us their business if our own profiles are poorly managed?). This is why we made the decision to invest in an ultramodern website ( www.distinkt.bg ) and present a totally new name and slogan - Usually right.
Video
2020 proved to be a great year for video. This is why he founded CRAVE - a concept-to-video agency which delivers exceptional video content to all of d:istinkt’s clients, retaining budgets within the group of companies.
Contribution to the organisation
-In addition to the revenue increase (55.6%) in 2020
-The business started shifting from chiefly Bulgarian customers to international clients and large cross-border projects and offering a range of new value-added products and services based on research & analytics and put data-driven communications at the core of the agency activities.
-He has been the driving force behind several large projects, notably a nearly 400,000 euro project for alternative and counter narrative campaign supporting the prevention of radicalisation leading to violent extremism communication in partnership with the Center for the study of Democracy and SafeNet foundation.
-Client billings results - 23% overall - one client doubled the agency fee in just two months, Another client managed to upsell and increase the agency budget by 300%, significantly increased billings for creative.