Interview with Dovilė Dovidavičiūtė, Managing partner Sons & Daughters agency in Vilnus, is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
What kind of animal is your agency, compared with others in Lithuania or the Baltics?
We run two agencies under one roof, with almost the same name: Sons and Daughters, an integrated communication agency, and Sons and Daughters ID, a branding studio specialized in brand strategy and identity. The first part was born almost 30 years ago as DDB, an advertising agency. Four or five years ago we became independent, and that side now does advertising and communication in a broader sense.
The whole scene is changing: there’s AI, and a lot of small one-person shops. Looking at this ecosystem, where is the real business potential? I hear that executional work like social posts, flyers, small promo pieces is increasingly going to those small shops, since they have no overhead and can offer great prices.
Strategy and ideas, conceptual thinking, creative concepts are still our core expertise. I think our creatives still come up with better ideas than AI does. For implementation or smaller tasks, of course we use AI ourselves.
As for the one-person shops, that’s not new. They’ve always had their own clients, we’ve had ours. Big clients usually don’t hire them directly.
In Lithuania there’s now a lot of in-house work, designers and in-house agencies handling that technical work themselves. Competition is real, and we feel real pressure to retain talent, since creatives now have far more options than just advertising agencies.
Every business needs to grow just to keep up with inflation. Where do you see growth over the next three years or so?
We’ve expanded our services: added branding, added PR. That’s one path. We can also take on international projects, because branding, unlike advertising or PR, doesn’t require deep local context, it’s more about design and visual language. We’ve done projects for Canada, for Belgium. That’s where we see growth.
We have four branding projects abroad so far. We’ve won a fair number of international awards like One Show and similar, and I think that’s where the reputation comes from. For example, we did strategy and branding for a VC fund in Lithuania; their colleagues in Belgium saw it and asked us to do something similar. It usually happens that way.
Do you actively reach out to international clients, or is it mostly inbound?
Mostly inbound. I know colleagues elsewhere in the Baltics who actively sell. We’re thinking about it, but for now we have plenty of local branding clients plus some international ones.
Branding is often more than design — it’s a business problem touching product, experience, even internal communication. What skills or qualities it requires from you?
There’s a lot of data available now, and everyone has roughly the same data. What matters is what you do with it. There’s always a creative leap between analysis and actually defining the brand. We have two strategists, both with 20-plus years of experience: one very strong analytically, the other with a creative-director background who’s good at making that jump from data to brand definition. That combination matters a lot.
Business owners and CEOs often complain that agency people — and marketing directors too — don’t deeply understand where the money and profit actually come from. Do you see that as a real problem?
We’re all in business, so we all need to be business-minded. I think people in smaller companies and agencies tend to be more business-minded by necessity. In a big corporation, budgets just arrive from somewhere, so it’s easier to lose that focus. In a smaller company, everyone has to understand how the money works. For a strategist, it’s non-negotiable. You can’t really help a client if you don’t understand their business.
We often struggle with “closed briefs”: a client asks for a TV spot or a media plan instead of bringing us a problem to solve. We usually push to get involved earlier, before the brief is finalized.
PR agencies have an advantage over ad agencies because their point of contact is often the CEO, while ad agencies usually deal with the CMO — who isn’t always the ultimate decision-maker, and there’s less money on the table.
That’s true. Actually, at a conference about half a year ago there was a big discussion about CMOs moving into CEO roles — quite a few Lithuanian CEOs now come from marketing. The conversation was more about how a CMO survives working for a CEO who used to be a CMO and knows all the tricks.
So you wouldn’t say there’s a structural problem there?
No. Talking to the top decision-maker is always better than talking to someone without the power to decide. But honestly, the lines between PR and advertising are blurring so much it’s getting hard to say where one ends and the other begins, except in specific cases like crisis management. In most cases the services and expertise overlap heavily. At the same time, there are lots of narrowly specialized agencies, so-called one-trick ponies that only do Google Ads or only TikTok. With a lot of those in the mix, someone has to integrate everything and see the whole picture: social, sales, advertising, PR. That’s a lot of expertise to bring together, so for bigger clients, that fragmentation is still a real issue.
You’re a partner in the Baltic Brand Study, how valuable is that to you?
We use it daily: for pitches, new business, and for understanding what would work better for a given target when working on a promotion. It’s an everyday tool. The “top brands” we publish are just a small visible slice of that database.
Some argue that classic field research is becoming unnecessary now that you can build synthetic AI personas and prompt-test ideas “act as a 65-year-old woman with five grandchildren who shops at Lidl.”
Our researchers actually do use that too. I don’t think it’s either/or, it’s a mix, useful for different things. What a synthetic persona lacks is the context of the moment: what’s happening that day, that period, what’s in the news. That’s not something it can capture, so it’s not fully accurate. We use both.
What’s the biggest professional challenge for you right now? What takes up most of your mental energy?
Efficiency! Doing good work we’re proud of, keeping clients happy, and staying profitable. That’s the main challenge, along with growth, especially in branding.
Do you feel clients are putting more pressure on prices, negotiating harder than before?
A bit of that, yes — and salaries keep rising even when budgets stay flat, so there’s tension there.
Companies always say it that the use of AI tools “helps,” but rarely quantify real cost savings. Do you think AI will actually start eliminating jobs and cutting costs meaningfully in the near future?
We haven’t let anyone go because AI made their role obsolete, we’re not there yet. Some work goes faster, but only some, so I can’t say it’s been a dramatic cost saver. And the tools aren’t getting cheaper, especially for things like video rendering: if anything, providers raise prices as companies grow more dependent on them.
AI may mainly eliminate simple technical work, which isn’t the expensive work anyway. The money is in strategic branding and consulting, which needs experienced people. AI is going to hit entry-level and junior positions hardest. For seniors, it’s a very good assistant for now. Where it goes in three to five years, whether it eventually becomes a near-perfect strategist or creative, is another question. But we’re not there yet.
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