Interview with Jānis Kuprašovs, Creative Director at WKND (Latvia), is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
How is business doing this Summer?
I think “mixed” is the right way to put it. I’ve heard from other agencies that they’re short on clients, even though they’re working hard. For us, summer has been a bit quieter than last year, but I wouldn’t say we have less work — we just have a little more time to develop concepts. The main thing is keeping a healthy pipeline, since clients don’t stay forever. That might mean doing more pitches, but I wouldn’t say the workload has dropped.
Who’s your biggest client right now?
Maxima is our biggest, but we try to keep their share from getting too large — we don’t want to depend on one client, because losing them would end the agency. So we work with a lot of smaller brands that aren’t running campaigns every month, but rotate: one brand does something in summer, another the next month. That way no single client dominates too much.
Tele2 was a pitch that lasted about a year and a half, and we won it in the end — great to work with them, and we recently won an ad festival prize for their first big campaign with us. It gave the agency and the creatives a real boost.
Many people complain — and you see it in award shows and even Cannes — that the volume of TV ads is shrinking, with more work moving to digital and influencer marketing. How would you describe the situation with your clients?
Big clients still use ATL media and shoot TV commercials. But we have many smaller brands doing a lot on social media — influencer videos, small funny ideas — rather than a typical TV ad with product placement. So yes, a lot of clients are doing less big-budget shooting and thinking more about digital.
TV ads used to be very profitable for agencies because of the big budgets. With social videos, budgets are much smaller — the workload might be similar, but you earn far less. How do you cope?
For big, beautiful ads we can showcase afterward, a large part of the budget goes to the film studio, and we just add a small fee. With the smaller social videos, we do production in-house — we’re not hiring expensive directors — so we end up selling more hours and actually earning more that way.
Does that mean you’ve had to widen your skills, since traditionally you’d create a storyboard and a production company would handle the rest?
Yes. I work closely with directors of photography to develop precise shooting storyboards, and I’m much more involved in production myself. We’re learning by doing.
Social media content presumably faces less pressure for perfect 30-second polish — more room to improvise. But there’s also huge competition for those few seconds of attention. How do you see that trade-off?
Exactly — social gives more flexibility on production quality, less stress about exactly how it looks. But you need an even stronger concept, because on TikTok or Reels you only get a couple of seconds before people scroll past, unlike TV where people are somewhat a captive audience.
Do you think a single big concept still holds together across TV, outdoor, and social — or are they living separate lives?
From what I see locally, social media lives its own life. Many clients now have in-house social teams who just take a concept and run with it however they like, without it tying back to one strong idea. That’s part of why brands lose their uniqueness — you’ll see three or four brands using the same influencer and the same style of jokes, and you can’t tell them apart.
With social media, anyone talented can create content — you’re competing with thousands of amateurs. What’s your advantage as an agency?
One of our clients runs their own in-house influencer for social jokes, and they’re now investing more in social than in ATL. Our edge is quality and reliability — clients know we deliver solid, creative work consistently. I also think brands relying on generic influencer content are quietly losing their distinctiveness, and eventually that catches up with them.
Where do you see growth potential for the agency?
There are fields we haven’t covered yet, like insurance. It’s a small market, and client conflicts limit us — if we work with Maxima, we can’t take on a competing retailer, for example. I do see potential in the defense and drone sector — new companies there may want advertising, possibly even on a broader, international scale.
One consequence of the downturn is agencies relying more on freelancers instead of full-time staff. Your site lists around 16 people. Is that a trend for you too?
We try to keep our core team lean and work more with freelancers, though they’re less reliable — they have their own schedules, and if you need a quick correction, the answer might be “tomorrow” instead of “today,” which is a real problem. Still, we use freelancers more when there’s room in the schedule — for overflow work or a specific style. But increasingly we’re investing in helping people grow and stay satisfied working with us directly, because in-house creatives are still where the real talent sits.
How organized is the influencer market in Latvia — is there a talent agency system?
I haven’t heard of one. There are informal tiers — top-class, mid-class, and micro-influencers — but no agency that supplies them. We rely on our in-house social media specialist, who knows the talent pool and can match the right influencer to a concept.
Finally, on AI — the initial hype seems to have settled. What’s your experience, and what’s been the biggest disappointment?
The early disappointment: a client came to us and said “let’s do something with AI” with no concept or idea behind it — just wanting AI for its own sake. That was an early warning sign.
That said, our designers and directors use AI tools regularly, and it genuinely helps with deadlines and generating a variety of sketch options. I’ve used an AI voiceover tool, and built an entire award-festival case study around AI. We also use ChatGPT to generate obvious ideas — precisely so we can discard them, since if ChatGPT can produce them, so can everyone else.
We’ve also moved past just generating images for their own sake. A few years ago we relied heavily on stock photo libraries; now we generate standard images — like the classic “woman holding flowers” — in minutes and refine them in Photoshop to look more natural. That’s a real efficiency gain.
The failures I see are mostly from smaller brands treating AI carelessly — posting images with blurry faces or warped backgrounds because it’s fast and they don’t bother fixing it. Bigger, more careful brands generally use it better.
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