“You can't think that it was all... That there was nothing like that. My students would always tell me: 'Well, Mr Mikeš, but in fact, you didn't do advertisement – as far as we think – during that Socialism.' We did, sure we did. At both the domestic and the foreign trade. But it was a different kind of advertisement, as far as the foreign trade was concerned we were working with journalists in most cases. And we had to come up with ideas. At one moment, for example, we were told that there were not so many tourists from Great Britain. So we were thinking: 'Damn, what should we do?' And then, I don't know who came up with that idea and if I was present, I don't remember that much, but in any case we wrote this press release about how many haunted castles and chateaus were in Czechoslovakia. As we knew that the English love specters and ghosts and they had those so-called ghost tours. So we made English translation and went to Reuters and to Associated Press, and we gave them the press release. And two days later, newspapers in England, including the Times, wrote that Czechoslovakia was a haunted place. So we had some problems because of that, like as if we said that people in high places were in fact the bogeymen, but there was an increase in tourism. So we did stuff like that.”
“They said: 'Look, Jirka, that's obvious, you were young and misguided. We are interested in you, no one wants you to... But please, tell us, how was it with that reporting? You took over the telex machine and sent it abroad.' I said: 'That's right, we sent it out, what was happening in the streets...' - 'And with whom did you do that?' And I refused to tell them with whom I did it, right? So they told me that I had twenty four hours to think it over. And again, I didn't think it over, so I was expelled. And I told myself: 'Well okay, so I will become a garbage collector, with the boys who were expelled before me or something like that.' But they said: 'You were expelled but due to your expertise we would let you stay.' And they turned my assistant into a director, and I had been preparing business trips to the West for them. That's how it was. And I could go just to the Soviet Union.”
“I was at Spořilov, in front of the U Jetonických pub, it was right at the square. And all of a sudden a Tatraplan was passing by. And it stopped and there was Mr Šlégl, who was my classmate's father, Hanka Šléglová's father. And he said: 'Jirka, why didn't you go to a Pioneer summer camp?' And I told him: 'Because I had this...' I had mumps or something like that. And he said: 'And would you like to go to Lány with us?' And I said: 'Sure I would like to go to Lány, but I need my mother's and my father's permission. So they gave me permission and I spent two weeks in Lány eith Mr president Zápotocký which was... I still remember how much of a brat I was. As we were eating roasted pork, I would cut off the fat meat. And Mr President said: 'Come on, that's... Just give it to me, right?' I have good memories of him, no matter what people say.”
“I used to go as an assembler but I had to arrange money. As they were short of funds sometimes. And the tourism department had money. And they needed to promote this country, our homeland, as a country appealing for tourists. So back then I did the Come and See campaign at Merkur and we did the logo. And with some architects we prepared how the new Czechoslovak exposition should look like and so on. I collaborated on those things and as a payback the boys from the foreign trade would always take me with them as a blue-collar worker.”
Jiří Mikeš was born on March 21st in Prague. After studying at a grammar school in Kodaňská street in Prague, he graduated from the University of economics in Prague and had been working as a PR consultant at Rapid, a national foreign trade company. He helped organize a series of international fairs and exhibitions, and in 1967, he went on a scholarship at the Institute for Public Relations in London. During the so-called ‘normalization’ he had been expelled from the Communist Party but was still engaged in international trade. Also the State Security took interest in him in 1972 and as a result he was recruited as its informer. At Merkur national enterprise he had been the director of the tourism advertisement department, after 1989, he was the director of the Czech branch of the McCann-Erickson agency, director of the Czech Association of the communications agencies and also a member of the executive committee of the European association of communications agencies. He had been teaching at universities in Czech Republic and abroad, currently he is a visiting professor at the University of Economics in Prague.
