Market In Focus: How NEM Dubrovnik Has Grown Into A Pivotal Boutique TV Market In Only A Decade
When Croatian-born TV exec Sanja Božić-Ljubičić set out to establish a television market in her corner of the world a decade ago, she had always felt the Balkan region had been overlooked on the global content map.
“The Balkan region was always somewhat neglected,” she tells Deadline. “But Croatia always seemed like a romantic little resort” which she thought would be an “ideal location for a boutique event” for top global executives.
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Indeed, the romantic and picturesque country, which lies entirely on the Adriatic Sea and was the first of the former Yugoslavia countries to join the European Union, is a beautiful setting. But crucially, says Božić-Ljubičić, who also runs local pay-TV and SVoD service Pickbox as well as media service provider Mediatranslations, she felt she was well-placed to create something that would align foreign industry professionals with local talent.
“I thought I could do better than some of the events that were circulating around at the time,” she says. “The experience was there, the people were there – we just needed the right market.”
And so, NEM (New Europe Market) Dubrovnik was born. The annual four-day event is described as the “TV market with a view” but as delegates who have attended the prominent market know, it’s much more than that.
In the last ten years, it has attracted a host of execs from top TV outlets ranging from HBO to Sky to Mediawan to All3Media, and it has consistently proven to be a fertile spot for connecting local producers with international financiers and companies. Back in 2015, it screened Croatian scripted series The Paper, about the last independent newsroom in Croatia being taken over by a construction magnate for all of the wrong reasons. That Dalibor Matanić-directed project, which is produced by Drugi Plan, was picked up by Netflix and became the first Slavic-language series on the platform.
NEM Dubrovnik was also the location where writer Lars Lundström, creator of Swedish hit sci-fi series Real Humans, connected with AMC International, which ultimately bought the format and produced the British version, Humans, with Channel 4 and Kudos.
Božić-Ljubičić admits that in its first year in 2013, she was expecting the event to lose money – a fairly typical situation for a first-time event – but “we broke even,” she candidly tells Deadline.
“Everybody came and everybody loved it, which is why we have a recovery of around 80% of people who come back each year,” she says, noting that this year’s event, which occurs June 5-8, will feature a panel with local execs who have attended each market in the last decade.
For Božić-Ljubičić, the intention was, and still is, to keep NEM Dubrovnik a very boutique event, with around 1,000 delegates in attendance each year. “This isn’t speed dating like other markets – we want people to get to know each other, have a nice glass of wine and really talk about your businesses.”
She adds, “We’re more international as a market and we obviously have a lot of people from the Balkan region such as local channels and agencies. But this is still a poorer region that cannot function without the financial injection of other countries. So, my intention was to always bring people here that could teach as well as financially back some of the projects that we can do.”
She admits that the region is a burgeoning one, that only really started 30 years ago after some countries began to extract themselves from former Yugoslavia. In total, the Balkan region has around 20 million people that speak four different languages – “This is the first problem,” she says. Secondly, “people don’t buy as much as they do in, say, Norway.”
But her mission to bring local stories to light with international expertise is unwavering. “For us, it’s not good to just do things locally because it really is confining yourself to a certain space,” she says. “The CEE region should be the target, yet we need to open up to the world. When you confine yourself, it makes it hard to open up to the world and other ideas.”
The region, she says, is brimming with creatives but for her “practice makes perfect.”
“If you cannot practice, you cannot be perfect and that’s what’s happened to the Adriatic and Balkan regions,” she says. “Only the free-to-airs [invested] a bit at first and they did it very, very rarely and so you couldn’t create a lot of producers and give them a lot of opportunities at first. But now, it’s slowly happening.”
She’s steadfast on her mission for more projects to be produced out of the region – “I’m not aiming to become California, but I’m aiming for us to produce more and show what we have. But without finances, nothing is going to be done so what I want to do in terms of co-production is find a way people can join hands, work together and create something together and then maybe it has a chance.”
Božić-Ljubičić adds, “So far, we have survived and we thrived, and going forward I want NEM to grow at the pace that it needs to be because you can’t force anything. We need to provide the best the media world can offer.”
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