Interview with the BalticBest jury member Rimantas Stanevičius, Creative Director at Milk (LT), is conducted by Hando Sinisalu.
You said you are in the middle of the pitching season. What does pitching actually look like these days?
It depends a lot on the situation and the client. Inflation has actually worked in our favor in some contract reviews, since it keeps pricing at the same level and forces both sides to revisit terms. Scale matters too – bigger projects often require a separate pitch. If we’re the incumbent and want to keep a client, we usually can’t refuse to re-pitch unless the relationship has genuinely soured, which hasn’t been the case for us.
A lot of pitches now come from government institutions, which are obligated to run them. Earlier in my career we were reluctant to deal with these more bureaucratic processes, but I’ve noticed a positive shift. We’ve gotten better at winning them. The evaluation criteria have also changed – it used to be something like 60% price and 40% quality/creativity, and now we’ve seen pitches weighted 80% quality and only 20% price. That’s a good change.
Interestingly, contracts with these institutions are often honored more reliably than with commercial clients. We’ve had strong relationships with organizations like EPSO-G and the Lithuanian airports. Then there are clients like Telia or IKEA, who simply have their own pitching traditions or agency rosters – if you want to stay on the roster, you play by their rules. Some of these are even paid pitches.
How much of your new business comes from pitches and tenders versus active selling? Or is it mostly inbound – waiting for a pitch to open and competing?
Clients pitch because they have their own procurement processes to follow. For a big client, it’s almost always a pitch. There have been rare exceptions, like winning an account without a pitch purely on reputation, when competitors were already tied up with rival brands – but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Smaller clients tend to come through relationships – someone in marketing moves to a new company and brings us with them, or refers us elsewhere. We’re also seeing more small and medium-sized businesses able to afford agencies at all, because media costs less (social/digital vs. traditional), and production costs less thanks to AI. That means we can offer them creative work at a price that makes sense.
Does that mean agencies like yours – offering strategy and ideas – are capturing a bigger share of the budget, since media and production costs are shrinking?
Not necessarily, unless you bring production in-house using AI tools rather than outsourcing it. We actually just took part in a pitch specifically to showcase our AI production capabilities. Some things we now do ourselves because of the tools available and because younger talent is fluent in them. Things we can’t do ourselves, we still outsource – sometimes even outsourcing an “AI director.” For the client it’s still cheaper either way.
The bigger trend is that smaller clients – who’d never have considered an agency like ours before – now can, because the total budget makes sense.
What about pan-Baltic or international pitches? Are you increasingly competing with foreign agencies?
Mostly it’s still Baltic agencies competing with Baltic agencies. With some telecom clients we’ve seen Western agencies bid, but they tend to be more expensive and less familiar with local markets. Sometimes global clients – take IKEA – already have a global agency and global materials that just get adapted locally, so it’s not really a pitch at all. We compete for the local or regional piece of a global account, but the global campaign materials just get localized. I think that’s true everywhere, not just here.
Do you see TV ad volume declining, replaced by shorter, simpler content for social and digital channels? Award shows like Cannes have fewer TV entries these days.
I don’t have hard numbers, but the feeling is there. We do a lot of social content, nowhere close to the volume of TV. A good portion of our video production now uses AI, and it’s growing – though we’ll see how that changes once the EU AI Act requires labeling AI-generated content. People say they get used to labels quickly and stop paying attention, so we’ll see.
Formats have gotten shorter-lived – you might produce something at high quality that lives for a day as a Reel or Story and then it’s gone. Big clients now tend to run two major, properly produced campaigns a year instead of one every month or two, supplemented with a lot of lighter content from influencers or AI. It’s a mix, aiming for efficiency.
There are also many solo operators and freelancers now – specialists, one-person shops. Do you see them as competitors or as collaborators you can work with instead of hiring in-house?
Collaborators, definitely. We still hold the brand know-how, the strategic and conceptual know-how – how to build stories rather than just copy whatever’s trending on TikTok. So we brief them, curate their work, and collaborate. If they can do it cheaper and it looks authentic, and the client is confident audiences will engage with it, we’re happy to work with them – including AI video directors. Funny enough, some of these are ex-colleagues of ours: former photographers or directors who realized they don’t need a production house anymore – just themselves and a set of AI tools.
How’s business overall? Every agency has ups and downs – how does the first half of this year compare to the past?
I’m not the numbers person, so take this with a grain of salt, but it feels like we’re plateauing – not just this year, last year too. Revenue isn’t growing much, though efficiency is improving; we’re learning to do more with what we have. It’s hard to judge properly during pitching season – you feel busy, but pitch work isn’t compensated the way real client work is. As a creative, I don’t hate pitching – it can be an incredible team-building exercise, mobilizing everyone and getting into a real flow state. It reminds me of the old days. But financially, doing free work for potential future business is exhausting. I’d like less work and more money.
Given how long you’ve been in the business and that it’s plateauing, does it feel repetitive – a groundhog day? Where’s the spark or ambition for you now?
I noticed in another interview you published that a colleague of mine, Andris Rubins, said something similar – that he has this fascination with technology. Same for me. I’m not afraid of AI; I like new technology, and that’s what keeps me in the industry. I see two directions for excitement. First, longer strategic and branding projects – the kind of people-to-people consulting work, because those results might sit on the side of a building for a decade, not disappear after one Instagram story that never went viral.
Second, all the technological possibilities: creating things now that you couldn’t before without being based in a major production hub, and automating the tedious, repetitive work. If we can secure capital to invest in R&D and build our own models, we could serve more small and medium clients with automated “daily hygiene” communications, freeing up time for the bigger strategic work – branding, major campaigns – that we wouldn’t hand over to AI anyway.
So the ideal is more time for ambitious creative and strategic work, while automating or outsourcing the repetitive, technical stuff?
Exactly – and I’d add that AI’s real benefit isn’t just producing more assets faster, it’s making decisions faster. Instead of conceptualizing an idea, pitching a vision to the client, and hoping they make the right call, you can build something close to an MVP yourself, evaluate it, and decide which direction to go – much faster. That applies beyond routine banner production; even for more ambitious creative work, you can test it quickly, showing the client actual moving video instead of static stick-figure mockups. That speed of decision-making is genuinely exciting.
It’s also interesting watching how internal teams adapt – even the youngest creative on the team effectively becomes a “creative director” managing an AI model, making creative-director-level decisions at a smaller scale. I’m cautiously excited about what AI can bring to agency life.
We also use synthetic focus groups to test ideas before showing clients – especially useful with bigger clients who already have solid audience segmentation and data. We can build a virtual focus group, test an idea, react to feedback, refine, and test again – instead of, say, wondering whether an idea that worked with Lithuanians would land with an average Latvian.
There are mixed opinions about synthetic personas and focus groups – AI can hallucinate, so how do you know if it’s hallucinating in a synthetic focus group?
Real focus groups are qualitative, not quantitative, to begin with – results depend on who’s in the room, the moderator, the mood, everything. AI-driven synthetic groups tend to converge toward an average, since that’s how the model is trained. So if you want a fast, low-cost way to test something, it’s a reasonable option. I’m not that skeptical about it – you just don’t take it as gospel. You use it as one more informed input, apply your own judgment, and make the final call yourself.
What’s the biggest pain point for you right now? What keeps you up at night professionally?
One thing that genuinely worries me is not knowing whether what I’m seeing is real or just a kind of collective hallucination – even reading other interviews. I see headlines saying the advertising market is growing and everyone’s doing great. I look at Cannes Lions and see the same bold, “brave”, non-traditional campaigns being celebrated year after year. I still want to make work like that myself, and sometimes we do, but I’m not as confident as I used to be that any of it is real.
It feels a bit like Alice in Wonderland – a hall of mirrors reflecting wishful thinking back at us, insisting agencies are doing great, winning international pitches, that everything’s fine.
Looking at it all, you get the sense the industry is shrinking globally, and that creativity itself has become commoditized. In-house teams do it, AI does it, and clients now call things “creative” that ten years ago would never have earned that label – because it’s just a copy of a copy of a copy. That’s what keeps me up at night: where is this actually going?
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