Kids vs. Hackers: How a Children's Hackathon Earned Its Headlines
At Publicity Bureau, the client list is short by design - more atelier than assembly line. And every once in a while, we take on a project pro bono, purely because we believe in it. This year, that project involved 230 people under the age of fourteen. Easily our youngest client base to date.
The Story
For two days in June, a sports hall in Belgrade turned into the region's largest playground for young programmers. The fourth Future Kids Hakaton, organized by Kliker IT centar and its co-owner Ivan Stanimirović, brought more than 230 children aged 8 to 13, over 80 teams from five countries - to Sportski centar Šumice in Belgrade. Their mission: "Misija siguran klik" - building digital solutions that make the internet safer for kids.
In 48 hours, they produced more than 70 working projects. Games, quizzes, animations, apps - all tackling online safety, a topic most adults still struggle to explain to their children. The kids didn't explain it. They built it.
What We Did
The easy part, honestly. The children provided the story, we made sure the right editors and journalists heard about it - in their own language. That meant press releases adapted for four markets in four language variants (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian), because "regional PR" that arrives as a copy-paste with a different city name tends to end up exactly where it deserves. Then distribution across Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, and tracking every pickup afterward - because coverage you can't measure is coverage you can't repeat.
What Came Back
The announcement and the post-event story, headlined Kids vs. Hackers ("Deca protiv hakera" ), did their rounds: Telegraf, BIZLife, Blic Biznis, Nedeljnik, Kurir, Netokracija, Internet Ogledalo, WebMind, TagMedia and more in Serbia, with regional pickup including Croatia's Portofon. The event also made it to national television, where the winners, team Kompajleri from Stara Pazova and their mentor Ana, got the one thing no press clipping can offer: a live audience watching them explain their own code. They handled it better than some CEOs we've prepped.
And then, a moment we didn't plan. On the sponsor wall - somewhere between Munchmallow, Bosch and Nestlé - a small logo under "PR support": Publicity Bureau. Not a sentence we get to write every day. Our dear friend, Ivan Minić, who brought us into the project, mentioned it in his LinkedIn recap too, by name. In a business where the best work is invisible by definition, we'll allow ourselves exactly one paragraph of visibility. This was it.
Why It Matters
Earned media is a simple faith: a genuinely good story, told properly, in the right language, to the right editor, finds its way into print without a single paid placement. The hard part of PR has always been finding a story worth telling, and this time, 230 children did that part for us.
Some projects end with a report. This one ended with the reassuring suspicion that the region's tech future is in good hands. Small hands, for now.
