Advertising in a New Phase

Alexander Dourchev, the CEO of All Channels Communication Group, visited the American University in Bulgaria on April 10.  He explained the structure of one of the biggest marketing oriented agencies in Eastern Europe and shared his professional view on today’s advertising and public relations.  All Channels Communication (ACCG) is the leading group of agencies, specializing in marketing services. It incorporates various spheres of full-scale communication services such as public relations, advertising, ATL, BTL and digital communications. These five main marketing units offer an integrated service to its customers.

"We believe that we have a unique service at the market, which has been developing for 13 years now," Dourchev said.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="450" caption="Aleksandar Dourchev, source: prnew.info"][/caption] Considering the fact that All Channels Communication entered the market when there was already an abundance of well-established advertising and PR agencies, it was especially hard for Dourchev to penetrate the market and to prove that his agency was worth it. The awards played their role in developing a good reputation around it and had crucial influence on its development. Eventually, they led to the establishment of integrated communication branches within the company. Today, they employ approximately 70 professionals who work with around 40 clients both in Bulgaria and overseas. The most important features that Dourchev wants to see in his employees are responsibility, activity and flexibility.

" I prefer team players [rather than stars], but sometimes there are stars who also are team players and those are the perfect employees. Actually, most of our managers are people like this and we are trying to polish these stars not to make them shine too much on their own, " Dourchev said.

Throughout the entire 13 years of its existence, All Channels Communication has been recognized as the best PR agency in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe and was awarded for its creative campaigns for Avon, Phillips and many others.

"We are especially proud for our biggest awards. We won five of them during the last two years; two of them were granted by the Forbes Magazine and the rest by Bulgarian HR Association. This proves our effort in business development," shared Dourchev.

However, he admits that advertising remains controversial, since it provides only positive aspects of a certain product, omitting its negative sides.

"I would say that yes, we should respect the ethics and our consumers, but it’s not true. We don’t do this, in fact. One or another way we try not to be honest in order to sell a product at any price. This is a capitalism, unfortunately,"Dourchev admitted.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="ACCG becomes "Agency of the Year" 2012, source: dariknews.bg"][/caption]

The social responsibility is to polish this situation and provide a human face to the business, he says. And while this social responsibility proved to have a positive influence on the market worldwide, at the same time it disappeared from Bulgaria, leaving it with no significant social campaigns. The reason is that advertising has relocated towards promotional activities and sales, where there ethics is often questionable.

According to Dourchev, it is important to understand the clear differences between PR and advertising. The role of advertising is to bomb consumers with as much information as possible, failing to provide feedback instruments. Whereas, PR is a more communicative branch, constantly looking for feedback. The biggest problem is that nowadays two of these absolutely different branches started to get mixed together.

"Advertising is slowly turning into PR and PR into advertising. As a result most of the advertising companies keep winning PR awards," Dourchev said.

He believes that now is just a starting point and this process will keep on going, eventually leading to “interesting” results. Dourchev shared that he will be more than glad to provide well-paid internships to AUBG students, who are willing to gain valuable experience in advertising business and provide their own input into the development of the company.