Interview with Egle Klekere, Founder at Deep White (Latvia), is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
What is your view on the role Social Media vs traditional media in PR. Is traditional media slowly dying?
To be honest, a few years ago I was on a similar track. I saw that media relations played a smaller role in our revenue, and it was decreasing fast…
But I’ve changed my mind, and so have many of our clients. It’s a combination, not traditional versus social. We’re like an orchestra conductor managing the whole communication landscape. Social media builds reach and engagement, but external validation still matters enormously. Even clients from very innovative industries believe in legacy media, because that third party validation is a license to operate. It’s like scientific magazines: if Nature or Science publishes something, you know it was peer reviewed. That gatekeeping function is still valuable.
How do you compete with AI-generated fake content? SoMe is full of it.
It’s a combination of strategies. The real problem with fake is volume. If fake content is unbelievable and full of curiosities, people spend hours watching it and lose interest in anything else. It’s addictive, and serious content often isn’t as polished or attractive by comparison. The noise has always existed, but now it’s extreme, so you have to be far more strategic about who your audience actually is and what makes them look at you again.
This connects to content marketing generally: we used to think mainly about persuading journalists, now it’s the same thinking applied to every audience.
In our agency we now have a department of talent and creators, with agreements across many influencers, because we see it’s relevant to include in strategy. It doesn’t get easier, it’s actually more complicated to allocate resources strategically toward what generates real results.
Serious brands now compete with entertainment across all channels. How far can they go creatively without hurting their reputation?
No one ever told us to be boring, no one wants a boring press release or a boring event. But boring gets mistaken for safe, and there’s a misconception that trust requires conservative communication. So banks all look the same and use jargon, government institutions turn bureaucratic, because it feels safe.
In our agency we talk often about how being boring is a bad idea. My view: be conservative with the facts, that’s where credibility lives, but be ambitious in how you present them. A CEO in a serious industry who’s gray and forgettable isn’t doing a good job. Creativity should never compete with credibility, but looking for new formats and being human is something I recommend to clients. Social media has proven that lively, human communication generates far more engagement, and that’s made it easier to persuade serious clients to take braver approaches.
Latvian PM is famous for filming a rough selfie videos in the car. Would you recommend such approach to business leaders?
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern started this trend. She was very open, doing that “driving home, talking to constituents” style of video, and I love it.
It shows transparency and it works. It’s not an easy thing for leaders to learn, especially from serious industries, because people are afraid of vulnerability. We’ve seen in leadership trainings that people want to appear smarter, nicer, more polished, and that takes effort to do the opposite. The higher you climb, the more this openness pays off. It’s all about credibility and transparency, and people look for that in politicians, CEOs, and experts alike. If everything looks perfect and nothing ever goes wrong, it’s simply not believable.
How to motivate B2B influencers, thought leaders? 300 EUR per post is not attractive for them.
The difficult part is translating corporate messages into serious, credible agendas and finding the right influencers for those topics. As for senior experts who aren’t moved by a few hundred euros, the motivation is different every time: sometimes it’s a project, sometimes research, sometimes the chance to be closely involved in something genuinely interesting. They have to be truly involved, not just asked to post. We think about the whole ecosystem around a client, who naturally benefits from the connection, and look for those natural relationships rather than transactional ones. Real opinion leaders won’t risk their name and reputation for a quick post, so they become partners and community members instead, and communication becomes the outcome of that relationship.
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