Goodmooooooooorning Belgium. Time to wake up.
We don’t do long weekends. Or do we? Either way, with July 21 (the national holiday) right around the corner, we decided to wake you up. Literally.
This weekend, together with our friends at BPX (Belgian Publishing Xperience), we dropped an open letter in all the major Belgian newspapers. The message is clear: Belgium is trending, local is the buzzword, but the money? Still running straight to Big Tech. Time to rethink that.
If you’ve been following, you already know Defiant and BPX have been building something bigger than a moment. We were there from the very beginning with BPX, the collective voice of the five biggest Belgian publishers.
We helped them write the manifesto. We set the tone for the launch event: “The future belongs to the Originals”. We made the teaser for the Amma book a statement. And now, for the National Day, we helped them call out a market-wide sleepwalk: Belgian campaigns dripping with culture, but digital budgets that leak across the border at record speed.
The open letter is a direct call to Belgian CEOs, brands, and agencies to stop claiming Belgitude if your media money never leaves Silicon Valley. It’s about waking up to the fact that 62% of our digital media budgets go to tech giants who don’t know what a koffiekoek is and don’t care where Herenthout is.
We’re proud to write, strategise, and shout it into every feed, every newsroom, every C-suite that needs waking up.
Le Soir, la Libre, L’Echo, de Tijd, de Standaard, Belang van Limburg, Gazet van Antwerpen, HLN, de Morgen, … pick your weapon of choice and read our open letter. Get inspired. And, if you’re serious, make your media plan a little more Belgian.
This year, not next.
