Interview with Paulius Senūta, Founder & CEO at Not Perfect Network, is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
How is your business doing? The news about the advertising industry isn’t very comforting these days.
We’re actually doing the opposite of everyone else – we’re doing very well. Last year was our best year ever, and this year is going to be even better.
And why is that? What do you do differently from the others?
It comes down to our investment in international business. All of our growth is international. Frankly, Baltics equals death. I personally started working on this very actively around 2022, so that’s about four years now, and today a very substantial share of our business is international – about one third of our revenue comes from outside the Baltics and has nothing to do with the Baltics.
The other thing that has started working for us – and this one does have to do with the Baltics – is the pan-Baltic proposition. We have quite a lot of Baltic clients who come to us for integrated service across all three countries.
But the real growth is international. For example, we’ve been working for three months now with what is currently our largest client – Yettel, a telecom in Hungary. It’s far larger than any client in the Baltics. We tend to think of Hungary as small, but Hungary is 9.5 million people in one market, while the Baltics are 5.8 million across three markets.
Can you tell the story of how you did it?
This is not a linear story – it’s complicated. Essentially, you develop a network of people. You go from one person to another person, to another, to another. We have several partners around the world we work with – mainly PR agencies, but some other agencies as well. Through them you get connections, and then you just keep flying around, talking to people, and asking for opportunities to pitch.
Most of what we do internationally is project work. We have only two true retainer clients; everything else is projects. Projects are both good and bad. The good part is that they’re large and substantial – we’ve done several projects in the US. The bad part is that when they end, you’re in trouble, because you don’t know whether they’ll continue. But really, it’s just pure sweat.
Beyond connections and partners, there are also consultants. In the UK and the US there are consultancies – so-called “dating agents” – who introduce agencies to clients and clients to agencies. But again: pure sweat.
Regarding the investment – flying around, meeting people, maybe paying fees to consultants – that’s not cheap. I think the average agency might dream of getting international clients, but when it comes to spending time and money, they decide it’s too expensive and go for the low-hanging fruit instead.
You’re right. Getting a client in the Baltics is far easier than getting a client in Hungary – the amount of time and money you have to put in is much lower. But I think the main barrier is less about money and more about time, understanding, and even knowing the language of how to talk to these clients. We’re on the periphery; we’re village people, in a way, and you need to learn how to talk to London people.
When it comes to cost, travel isn’t actually that expensive. Maybe because we’re village people, when we buy a flight ticket we think it’s expensive – but come on, it’s 300 euros or so within Europe. It’s not so much about money. It’s about time, and about sticking with it – repeating the effort without any immediate results.
In the Baltics, people want to spend three days of effort and land a client, and if they don’t, they conclude it doesn’t work, that nobody appreciates creativity. But if you’ve put in six months of work with nothing to show for it, it’s very hard to put in the seventh month. And that’s exactly what it takes.
Eventually, it’s partly a numbers game. I was talking to a producer selling services who calculated that he converts one out of 98 requests – he provides 98 cost estimates to get one approved. I thought he must be exaggerating, because my conversion is better; I haven’t done the exact math, but it’s maybe one out of 20 or 30. Still — how many agencies in the Baltics are ready for 97 failed opportunities?
Coming back to the Hungarian example – okay, you’re active, you’re contacting people, you’re networking. But what are you actually doing better or differently than, say, Hungarian agencies?
In the Hungarian case, it was ultimately a regional pitch with agencies from across the CEE. They made a shortlist of five, and we made it onto that shortlist – and that alone was a long journey, because first you have to get onto the long list, and that is the real question.
This particular client was looking for an agency outside Hungary, because they were somewhat disappointed with Hungarian agencies and felt they weren’t very creatively focused. And it was a telco pitch – and we know telcos very well. We have worked for 17 telco brands, so we’re something of a telco expert. We understood where they were coming from and what the challenge was. And then we won the pitch.
The first public result of that partnership reached the Hungarian market this summer. Yettel’s integrated campaign talks about network speed through everyday, playful human moments rather than technical specifications: engineers work with calculations and milliseconds, while users turn that technology into conversations, games, memes and AI searches. An image-led phase runs during the third quarter across television, digital channels and selected retail touchpoints in Hungary, with handset-focused communication to follow.
“The insight was almost embarrassingly simple: people are done with advertising about fast internet,” said Rokas Eltermanas, Executive Creative Director at Not Perfect Vilnius. Technology was deliberately taken off the pedestal, he said – the hero is not the network, but the person using it.
Kata Hamza, Director of Brand and Marketing Communications at Yettel, said the company had been looking for a partner that could bring a fresh perspective to the category, and that this first campaign is intended as the foundation for longer-term work. One of the most demanding sequences was filmed on a water slide in 40°C heat; the production partner was Hungary’s AbroadFilms.
Winning the pitch is one thing – and I think what we’ve found so far is that we’re very competitive once we’re in the room. The genuinely hard part is getting considered at all, getting onto the long list. As you know, pitching and properly engaging with agencies takes clients a lot of time, so they won’t engage a hundred agencies – they know that unless they engage properly, nothing good will come of it.
We do have our own distinctive assets. For example, we have a proprietary creative process called Creative Fast Forward, which we’ve developed and codified over 20 years, and which cracks a brief very quickly and very creatively. But for most Baltic agencies, the first step is getting onto the long list. You still have to win the pitch, obviously – but first you need to be on the list.
Speaking of the Baltic market – you mentioned you’re also growing outside Lithuania with pan-Baltic clients. As far as I understand, you’re more or less the only agency that is truly pan-Baltic: the same brand in all three countries, operating as one entity. No one else, as far as I know, does that.
That’s my understanding too. Factually speaking, Havas probably also has the same brand across all three countries with Havas Creative. Beyond that, you’d find the same shareholders operating under different brand names in each country.
Based on the client feedback we hear, we are the only truly pan-Baltic solution. It’s not three agencies sharing a brand name while really thinking differently, each convinced the others are idiots, with no governance, no way to allocate who does what, competing with each other. We’ve cracked that pretty well. And now we have a lot of these clients: Lidl, Akropolis, Neste, Carlsberg, Xiaomi, and several more.
Speaking of agency models more broadly – you mentioned client conflict. In a small market, avoiding conflicts is nearly impossible: there are only three telcos, five banks, six retailers. If you have one of each, that sets hard limits on agency growth. You’re fishing in a very small pool.
You’re asking my favorite question. First of all, client conflict is, in itself, nonsense. For some reason it’s been imposed on agencies – no other industry has it. Look at the consulting business: McKinsey sells category expertise. “We know telcos – that’s why we do all the telcos.” And they sit far higher up the value chain than agencies do.
Second, this is disappearing worldwide, for two reasons. One: agency margins are shrinking. Where agencies used to aim for 20%, 7% is now quite common – and with margins like that, agencies simply stop entertaining conflict restrictions. Two: the business has become largely project-based rather than retainer-based; there are far more projects than continuous flows of work. That’s why you still won’t see Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the same agency, but you do see plenty of direct competitors in the same agencies around the world today.
In the Baltics, people still try to assert it. It depends on the client – the more sophisticated and smarter the client, the less they care. And besides, it’s actually illegal: under the civil code, you can’t restrict competition this way, so clients have been changing their contracts, because you can’t put it in writing. Of course, clients can still exert influence beyond the contract.
So in the Baltics the expectation still exists to some extent, though it’s fading. You can see, for example, that Ogilvy works with both SEB and Artea. In my experience, the most sensitive clients at the moment are in Latvia, for some reason. We still constantly have this discussion with clients, but less and less. It’s becoming an artifact. I think in another ten years it won’t exist.
What’s your biggest business challenge at the moment?
Geography is still a limitation for us. Because of where our offices are, a lot of large clients simply won’t consider us. I go to London quite often, spend those 300 euros on travel, talk to consultants – and my opportunities are still trickling down to me because of my geographic limitation. I’m thinking about how to solve that. We’re working on a solution – nothing to show yet – but we’re looking at expanding our footprint into major worldwide marketing hubs, where the business actually is.
If you look at it seriously, there are two places where agencies go to battle: London and New York. That’s where they compete, and that’s where the business is. And interestingly, when you think about marketing, marketing is really American – 60% of all marketing expenditure is in the United States. It’s a very American thing. You might think London is big, but even London isn’t that big.
So that’s my challenge: how to have a presence where the money is.
BalticBest 2026
SUBMIT YOUR WORK FOR FREE HERE!
(first make your own profile, log in and then click this link again)
If you have any problems, please contact [email protected] / +372 502 8561 or [email protected] / +372 5144884
- Entry deadline: 31 August
- Shortlist announcement: 9 September
- International jury evaluates shortlisted entries via live stream: 15–16 September
- Awards ceremony: 25 September (Baltic Brand Forum in Riga)
