BULGARIA INTERVIEWS

Advertising is one of those businesses, which has changed so rapidly and dramatically in the past few years that if you have lived long enough to remember the olden days, you might think of the early 2000s as if they belonged to the pre-Diluvian age. Contemporary advertising is fast, digital, ever changing and constantly fine-tuning to reach its target groups more efficiently, helping old and young, big and small companies to prosper and succeed. Or to fail, if they underestimate how modern advertising works.

Maxim Behar is a globally recognised Public Relations and media expert, diplomat and entrepreneur. He is a founder, the CEO and the chairman of the board of M3 Communications Group Inc., the leading Bulgarian PR company and a part of the largest public communications corporation in the world, Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Maxim is also the president of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation.

Meeting at a children's museum is hardly the right place for a serious conversation about charity, development aid and politics. However, Muzeiko, this country's newest museum, which is also one of the very few purpose-built, is extraordinary museum. Inaugurated in 2015 and paid for in full by the Sofia-based America for Bulgaria Foundation, it is both an academy and a playground for kids who come here to look at spacecraft and weather stations, to explore wildlife and to take in and try to understand bits of the technology that makes our lives what they are today.

France's outgoing ambassador, Bulgarian-married Xavier Lapeyre de Cabanes, has made a name for himself as being outspoken on any issue ranging from art to education, public relations and politics. By calling a spade a spade on key issues for Bulgaria as the rule of law and compliance with EU-related commitments, Lapeyre de Cabanes has gained the respect of many intellectuals and ordinary citizens who see Bulgaria firmly in both the EU and NATO. Xavier Lapeyre de Cabanes arrived in Bulgaria in the autumn of 2013.