Ruža Ristanović, the Director of Diplomacy&Commerce magazine, was born in Zenica in 1978.
She studied marketing at Belgrade’s Faculty of Economics. She started her professional career as the PR Manager of the Ministry of Education in 2002. Two years later, she began working for Roaming Electronics in the position of Marketing and Communications Manager for the Samsung brand.
Together with telco operators, she devised and implemented a campaign called ‘Be Legal’, geared towards combating the illegal telephone market in Serbia. Ruža started her career in the media in 2007, first as the Brand Manager for the Ringier magazines, and then as the Marketing Director. Her duties included managing marketing activities, market research and communications for the entire portfolio of Ringier Axel Springer in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
She was awarded the UEPS Silver Plaque in 2009 for leading the campaign for repositioning of NIN weekly. In July 2011, she started working for CorD magazine as the Executive Director. During her five-year-stint in this position, she developed the magazine’s portfolio and established cooperation with various embassies, foreign chambers of commerce, domicile and international institutions, the Serbian government and the governments of regional countries.
She also cooperated with organizations like NALED, FIC, AmCham, DSW and others. During the same period, she was a member of ABC Serbia, an organization that deals with media standards, where she, as the Vice Chairwoman of the Media Committee, participated in projects relating to the implementation of the standards of media audience measurement and analytics, the implementation of the Genius standards, and drafting of the Advertising Law.
She came to Color Press Group in 2016 where she is now the Director of Diplomacy&Commerce magazine, a syndication of the London-based The Economist, World IN, CSR, Green Serbia and numerous publications that come under the title InFocus and are created in cooperation with chambers of commerce. Ruža is also a member of the Public Relations Society of Serbia (DSOJ) and the Serbian Association of Managers (SAM). Additionally, she is the company’s representative in the German, Swiss, Greek, Croatian, French, Slovenian and Italian chambers of commerce. In her spare time, she writes a travel and food blog, administrates the Facebook page called “Life is Beautiful” (“Život je lep”), and volunteers as a community manager for the movement called the Gardening Guerilla. She is also a proud owner of the Maltese dog called Mikhail Romanoff, and her life motto is “just move forward, life is beautiful”.