Goodmooooooooorning Belgium. Time to wake up.
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 their 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 for the National Day, we helped them call out a market-wide sleepwalk: Belgian campaigns are dripping with culture, but digital budgets leak across the border at record speed.
The open letter was 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 located.
And the community woke up, local entrepreneurs
and media experts connected and reacted.
This was only the beginning. Another pivotal moment was when a study from big tech announced that 1.4 seconds is enough to create brand engagement. We took this opportunity to make a new strong statement for local media, highlighting the difference between Attention and vanity KPI’s such as Impressions and CPV.
And at the end of 2025 we dropped a new years letter, linking BPX to a study that showed the importance of our local creative community and local media spending for the Belgian economy.
We’re proud to write, strategize, and shout it into every feed, every newsroom, every C-suite that needs waking up: make your media plan a little more Belgian. This year, not next.
On July 21 (the national holiday) we decided to wake you up. Literally. 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.
