Interview with Andris Rubins, the CEO at Magic, is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
We haven’t really seen any emerging local brands here recently – the good old times, when all of today’s established brands were created, seem to be over.
Well, I suppose there was a time when more companies were being built or reborn, because the economies were younger and the markets weren’t as saturated. Many older brands also needed to be redesigned for new times. By now, most of the bigger brands have done that exercise, so they’ll probably need it again in ten or twenty years – but not every year.
As for new companies, they are definitely being born – we see the startups emerging, which is great. But for many of them the focus is on global markets rather than on local Estonia or Latvia. And this is actually why we will launch an absolutely new ranking for the Baltic Brand Forum this year, going beyond the Brand Capital study, which still covers the three Baltic countries. We will launch a new study that will collect data from the global internet about which startup and technology brands from the Baltics are performing best in terms of reach, engagement, and consistency.
How do you keep up with the changes in the advertising industry?
This is one of the most challenging periods I’ve experienced in my 25 years in advertising. And it’s not because there’s one single threat or one problem; the pressure comes from almost everywhere. In-house marketing – the in-house agency idea – is booming. AI is taking over, but it’s not yet applicable to every area, so there’s a lot of experimentation going on. And beyond AI, there’s the whole idea of automation: all the manual work behind the more technical communication materials has to be replaced by automated platforms.
This is where Magic is currently testing and experimenting a lot. We really hope that within the next few months, or a year, we’ll replace a large part of the manual work with these semi-automated systems – when it comes to campaign material adaptation, banners, videos, all the technical formats. We’ve known and followed these tools for a long time, but until recently they were too expensive for our small markets. Our Scandinavian partner agencies have been happily using them for more than five years, but when the minimum fee is 80,000 or 100,000 euros just to have the tool for a single client – and you know the campaign budgets here – it didn’t make much sense. Today the situation has changed: just like other technologies, these tools have become more accessible and affordable, so we are now testing three different platforms.
The biggest risk for agencies is to stay somewhere in the middle. You are either a creative consultant, able to create fantastic, unexpected, bold ideas and campaigns that AI won’t produce and that in-house agencies most probably won’t be capable of producing either – or you move into automated efficiency and become the fastest agency at producing all the campaign materials, performance marketing, and digital content. Of course, there are agencies like us that try to do both. But that still means we need to get even better at creating those big, unexpected ideas – and charge enough for them – while becoming super fast and highly automated in production.
Baltic agencies have long dreamed of breaking out of our small markets and working with international clients.
Yes, we see a lot of potential there – it’s my personal focus. I handed the managing director role over to our client service director precisely so that I could spend more time building those relationships beyond the Baltics. And the first great result is that we’ve won a Swiss brand and are now responsible for its brand development globally – 120 countries. It’s the Swiss gardening tool brand Felco. We were fortunate – or rather, happy – to be invited to that global pitch, and of course we invested an enormous amount of effort.
How did you get there?
Well, there’s another great exporter from Riga called Scandiweb. They’re a 400-person company that already works with global clients – they build e-commerce platforms and e-shops and do the digital marketing that drives people to those shops. But they don’t have creative directors or creative teams. So some time ago we met with Scandiweb’s owners and discussed complementing each other: whenever one of the best e-commerce players in the Baltics – one that already works with many global clients – needs the creative capacity they lack, we step in.
And that’s exactly what happened. They won the e-commerce business a year ago, and when the client decided they needed branded content – more emotional material for the brand, which they’d never had – we joined forces. Felco, the “Rolex of the gardening industry,” had previously worked mostly in B2B, where you don’t necessarily need big ATL campaigns; it’s mostly CRM, direct marketing, and very professional language. Now they’ve recognized there’s a large B2C segment – everywhere – with a lot of untapped business potential. The first step was the e-shop with Scandiweb, and now we are responsible for building the Felco brand in B2C markets. The product is already available in 120 countries.
And what exactly do you do? What’s your role?
Actually, just now we’re already working on this project. We are responsible for the brand platform and all the brand assets. We have a lot of ideas for the next three to five years that we want to build together, but at the moment we’re laying the foundations.
Business-wise, how big is that compared to your biggest Latvian clients? Is Felco now your biggest client?
Not yet. At the beginning, first of all, you spend a lot of time pitching. Now we’re spending a lot of time finalizing the brand platform. We’re still in the phase where everything is in the making. But once all the materials are produced and we start running with it, I’m sure it has the potential to become one of the biggest clients for the agency. We’re not there yet.
It’s a new discipline for them, so they’re taking a test-and-learn approach. They want to start small and, after piloting in one or two countries, go global if it works. So again – step by step. But looking five years ahead, I see a fantastic opportunity, and not just with this client. If we can have those regional and global clients who need campaigns, sponsorships, and collaboration projects across many countries, the growth potential is by far bigger than Latvia or the three Baltic countries alone.
That’s one good example. The other one worth mentioning: since we became independent and got our own brand, doors have opened for Magic to become much more influential across the Baltics. Now almost every second project Magic does is pan-Baltic. That has helped us grow from a purely local agency with a few tiny pan-Baltic campaigns into a truly pan-Baltic one – which is great, and which I really value.
But how do you operate in Estonia and Lithuania without local offices? Do you have preferred partners, or how does it work?
First of all, yes, we have partners in Estonia and Lithuania – several agencies we can join forces with whenever needed. Some clients prefer to keep control themselves when it comes to adapting concepts and localizing materials, so it varies. But also, to solve this issue – to have ears and eyes in different countries – we joined the global network of independent agencies called ICOM this year. It gives us access to 50 countries today, and I believe around 20 more are planned to join in the coming years.
Even in the Felco pitch, at the final stage, we tested our concept with our US and UK ICOM partner agencies. They gave us genuinely valuable feedback from their strategists and creative directors – and even from some Felco users in the United States and the UK. That gave us confidence that the brand platform we were building would really work and be relevant in those markets, and we also received very useful input on which local issues needed to be addressed for it to work well.
Baltic agencies are often cautious about such risks, fearing they’ll spend a fortune and get nothing. If you sum up all the expenses – labor, travel, research, consultation – what cost range are we talking about?
It’s somewhere between 25K and 50K. We’ve been calculating – I haven’t done the exact calculation for this pitch, but I believe it will be toward the higher end. That covers the research, the strategic brand positioning, all the creative materials – 360 degrees: sketches, drafts, videos, you name it. In previous pitches where we really went all in, it was around 25–30K. In this case we probably did even more, because we also spent time working on the media mix in those countries, and we redesigned their packaging as an idea – showing how we think it should evolve. So I’d say it was closer to a 50K investment in the pitch.
Quite a remarkable business risk: You must be ready to spend that 40–50K and possibly not get the client, and maybe not even earn it back in the first year.
That’s why we would only pitch like this for a long-term agreement. We would never pitch with this level of investment for a single campaign. And of course, the longer we work with a client, the more we learn about each other, and the more efficient our work becomes – we no longer need to do the full research, because we already know a lot.
But yes – in previous years we hoped that brands from France, Italy, or Spain would call us and say, “Hey, Magic, we saw you’re among the best agencies in the Baltic brand ranking – why don’t you do a project for us?” It never happened. Never. It’s all about networking.
Actually, I’d extend that to all Baltic agencies: we need to connect with each other. If someone is great – like the animation studio Panic in Latvia, which already works with global brands, or Film Angels Studio, which does film, commercial, and ad production for Germans, Finns, even Koreans – I’m connected with all of those companies. I think that’s one of the ways we can help each other, because out there, it’s a jungle. Nobody wants or needs a Latvian agency in Switzerland or Finland – they have plenty of local agencies ready to sweat for them. So we need to promote each other and complement each other. And of course, we’ll need to work and invest to get there. Once you already have a portfolio of global brands, I’m sure it becomes easier to get to the next pitch – and probably even to win some clients without pitching at all.
Some agencies once thought the way forward was to open an office in Berlin, Amsterdam, or Kolkata Kolkata and start winning clients there. But that’s probably very expensive a route.
It is expensive, and I think it carries a higher risk than our approach: building the strongest possible team in Riga and staying connected with very experienced partners and agencies all over the world. I believe this model is the best way forward for us at the moment. I’m not saying we’ll never open a subsidiary in the next ten or twenty years. But so far, clients are fine with us not being physically present in their countries. The pandemic has been amazing in that sense – before, there was a clear geographical barrier if you didn’t have an office in Paris or Berlin. Now, the clients have no issues working with the agencies remotely.
BalticBest 2026
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