The controversial Serbian TV Pink continues to gain ground – and airspace – filling what is, in many respects, an irregularly regulated transitional post-war media void. Now showing (everything) on a screen near you.

In 1993, building on the success of a small recording studio business, Zeljko Mitrovic, who’s been shrewdly building a media empire since the late 1980s, established Pink International with the launch of his privately-owned commercial radio station Radio Pink. The following year saw the launch of TV Pink, a commercial television station.
The station fed – and fed on – a steady diet of cheaply produced programming that offered manufactured drama, titillation, and sensational news; this winning formula brought the viewers and made the venture rich. Today, top-rated Pink’s philosophy not only stands directly opposed to the public service approach, but is actually driving the evolution of the media in Serbia and forcing everyone else to either adapt or die.
Not long ago, in an era of war, hyperinflation, and public sacrifice, TV Pink’s mindless entertainment proved a welcome and highly popular distraction. Even if Pink was not an overtly “political station,” it became the centre of a highly influential – and politically-charged – phenomenon: Turbofolk music, a new sound that blended electronic dance rhythms with Serbian and Gypsy melodies and lyrics that ran from saccharine to nationalistic.

Today, TV Pink reaches over 90 percent of Serbian homes and has subsidiaries in neighbouring countries. Its domestic advertising revenue accounts for about a third of Serbia’s overall advertising spending, which reached $85 million already back in 2003. The station is dedicated to high ratings, which it achieves through a mix of American movies, Serbian pop music, and (impossibly) scantily clad women. Its journalism is generally sensational and widely seen as thin, particularly in comparison to the big public broadcaster B92’s typically probing coverage.
And TV Pink continues to grow. Under Milosevic, the station was prohibited from broadcasting news or any other type of “information program”. When it started its own news show after Milosevic’s fall, the program was frequently seen as a vehicle for partisan attacks, a fact that did not really distinguish it from most other news programs.
Pink’s “information programming” continues to range from the evening news to talk shows to more recent additions such as Split Images, a popular satirical show in which Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s current prime minister, is portrayed as a female opera star.
All this has helped put Pink in a curious market position. Srdjan Bogosavljevic, who runs SMMRI, Belgrade’s dominant polling outfit, has said that people may watch Pink, but it embarrasses them. In surveys, people often claim, for example, that during the Milosevic years they got their news from opposition sources. “But when you interview them carefully,” he says, “you can see by the answers they give that they were watching Pink.”
Actually, the paradox of Pink goes well beyond embarrassment. For media reformers, Pink’s continued success in the post-Milosevic era stands as a symbol of their failure. But dislike of Pink cuts across class and education lines: people may talk about the company’s questionable deals and political connections – but just as often they’re also avid viewers.
More broadly, there’s the simple fact that the ongoing poor standard of living in which the majority of Serbians live tends to push overall programming quality – not to mention media reform – off the list of priorities. With an unemployment rate of around 30 percent and the average monthly wage only a few hundred euros, the attitude of many is that TV Pink now – as then – offers refuge from reality.
Mitrovic once suggested that his programming, given its broad appeal, could be seen as something of a unifying force. But that’s not really how he pitches TV Pink. Rather, he claims to represent an entirely different sort of reformist agenda: “For us, commercial programming is most important,” he says. “We tore down monopolies, we were pioneers. It should not happen that Serbia gets only public service stations.”
While Pink has clearly been forcing its competitors to try to match its commercial success, it’s also done more than any other station to professionalize Serbian broadcasting. The station pioneered the use of ratings and people meters for making programming decisions, and although most large stations in Serbia now use these tools, Pink has been the most aggressive in responding to the information they provide. From very early on, Mitrovic concentrated on building solid advertising revenue – not necessarily a self-evident strategy in a media world that was emerging from socialist management. Bogosavljevic, whose firm has done polling for Pink, once said that Mitrovic is “the only one in Serbia with true media understanding.”
Pink has been pushing hard into foreign markets: with recent stations launches in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, and now broadcasting in Macedonia and Bulgaria, it’s become the only pan-regional station originating in the region.
Only last April, Pink International’s TV Pink was awarded a national television license in the Republic of Serbia by the Republic Broadcasting Agency, Serbia’s regulatory body responsible for broadcast media. (A company can buy up local and regional licensees, achieving regional or national coverage, and in so doing, avoid the need for hard-fought national licenses – this was how TV Pink BiH achieved coverage of large parts of the country back when it was first established in 2003.) A month later, Pink Media Group founder Mitrovic received the “Manager of the Year” award from the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce.
Now the group (PMG) is going into the movie business: they began filming work on their first feature film last autumn, and are constructing a huge studio complex scheduled for completion this year. With diversified operations including filmed entertainment production, radio and television broadcasting, satellite television production, music recording, optical media replication (CDs and DVDs), even executive/VIP aviation services, Mitrovic and the group look set to stay very much in the pink.
Author: Jeff Bickert