Interview with Ralfs Vilands, CEO/Founding partner at VA Communications Rud Pedersen Group and Strategic Partner at VA Government Rud Pedersen Group, is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
How is the PR & Comms business climate right now in Latvia? Any notable trends?
There are essentially no long-term investments at the moment. A lot of companies are still thinking short-term — nobody is planning a year or even half a year ahead anymore, only a quarter at a time. That’s partly cumulative: the war in Ukraine, various other pressures, all pushing companies to hold onto their money rather than commit to marketing spend. They still invest, but they recalculate every quarter.
That said, from an agency’s perspective, this can actually be an opportunity. If a client wants to lock in a five-year agreement at a fixed price, that’s bad for us. But if they renegotiate quarterly, we can adjust more easily for inflation. Despite everything, last year both of our agencies — VA Communication/Rud Pedersen Latvia and VA Government/Rud Pedersen Latvia — had one of the best years in our history, combined.
Which sectors were driving that growth?
Retail, finance, and local industries like food processing. Some clients made significant investments in high-value-added production in and around Riga, and we supported them there. We’ve also handled a number of business disputes involving government.
Some Baltic advertising agencies — Magic in Latvia, Not Perfect in Lithuania — claim success exporting their services abroad. Is your business more local by nature?
Yes. PR, public affairs, and corporate communication are inherently local — if a client expanded into Germany, they’d need a German agency. We don’t see much opportunity for growth outside the country, simply because the work is so local. Language and meaning don’t translate the way, say, a graphic design concept does. The upside is that no foreign agency can easily come in and steal our clients either.
What about horizontal growth — PR agencies moving into social media advertising and creative work, with the boundaries between disciplines disappearing?
That’s happening for us too. We handle the packaging deposit system account end-to-end — graphic design and advertising included, with no separate ad agency involved. We do the same for some local producers: advertising, social media, all of it.
Your Lithuanian partners, Fabula, are quite aggressive on that front — competing directly with ad agencies in pitches.
We’re not as fully integrated as they are, but we have a much stronger public affairs and government relations arm. These days, social media and classical advertising are also tools for influencing decision-makers — they’re not just attending meetings with lobbyists, they’re scrolling too, and they want to see what people actually think. That kind of grassroots digital advocacy is something we introduced in Latvia.
Andreas Kaju from Meta Advisory in Estonia mentioned an interesting shift — even defense companies, like Sig Sauer, are becoming active on social media, partly because the younger people now sitting on procurement committees may simply never have heard of them.
Yes — defense companies are active on LinkedIn, on X, even sometimes Instagram. Younger decision-makers consume both traditional and social media, so it makes sense. Ten years ago this sector was very conservative and secretive — still is, for understandable reasons — but they’re investing more and more in marketing.
With the rise of highly specialized boutique agencies — one doing only TikTok, another only Google Ads — do you see them as competitors or partners?
The agency landscape here is shifting. Some agencies have disappeared, new ones have appeared, and there’s a whole “plankton” layer of very small operations — one or two people working out of an apartment or a café, sometimes just one person and a dog. They can do very good work in narrow niches, and I hadn’t even heard of some of them before. We cooperate with several — sometimes for a single project, sometimes as a production partner when we need extra hands.
On media: a year or so ago, a new communications director for Estonia’s Reform Party argued there was no point publishing an opinion piece in a traditional news outlet anymore, since boosting a Facebook post could reach far more readers. What’s your take?
He has a point, in a narrow sense. Our current Prime Minister does a daily video recap — straight to camera, covering the day’s events with some graphics — and it’s genuinely popular; it feels like direct, natural contact with the public. But he never has to field the hard questions, because nobody’s asking him any there.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1JGArNdEps/
That’s the real issue. It’s about accountability — it’s a curated, one-way channel. Professional media matters for democracy precisely because it can ask inconvenient questions. And these platforms are foreign-owned; if the state keeps funneling attention and money to them without also supporting classical media, that’s a real long-term problem — even if the risk of a platform simply being shut down is mostly theoretical.
But is traditional media also partly to blame, for not adapting fast enough to how people actually consume content now?
Absolutely. Twenty years ago, Diena was Latvia’s biggest publishing house, but they essentially ignored the internet — and a small startup, Delfi, overtook them within five years. Diena nearly went bankrupt because they simply missed the shift. Some Latvian media still aren’t good at social platforms or adapting to short-form, multi-platform content. We’re still debating merging Latvian Television and Latvian Radio into one content hub the way Estonia has — but radio still thinks of itself as radio, television as television, and journalists on both sides see any merger as an attack on democracy. It isn’t. It’s a technological shift.
What about influencers? Unilever’s CMO recently said the company now allocates most of its marketing budget to them.
We use influencers too — for the packaging deposit system, for Rimi, and other clients. They’re genuinely relevant now.
What’s the agency’s role, given influencers are essentially their own content creators, media channel, and sometimes agency all at once?
Choosing the right influencer for the right client. With a hundred options to pick from, our job is judging relevance — we’re arbiters of relevance. Latvia is a small country, so if someone has real influence, they tend to get noticed quickly; there isn’t a large formal database or talent-agency infrastructure behind it.
What’s the biggest professional challenge for you right now?
Keeping the best people in the industry, and maintaining the right balance between strategic consultancy — which is where the real value is — and pure execution work, which isn’t particularly profitable on its own. Being a genuine consultant to a brand — positioning, tools, messaging, tying public affairs and external communication into one holistic message — that’s the valuable part of the job.
Your counterpart is usually the CEO rather than a CMO — unlike in advertising, where CMOs often lack final authority.
True, and that’s often an advantage, since a CEO can actually act on what we agree. That said, the better CMOs today understand not just sales and brand, but corporate reputation too — and they’re the best to work with, because they understand that reputation sells. The younger, digitally-native generation of marketers tends to be very performance-driven — an ad goes up, clicks and sales follow within the hour — while reputation is a long game that’s much harder to measure. That’s probably why some of them are less comfortable with it.
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)
