Brave enough to stand out. Brave enough to be honest. Brave enough to trust your instincts. Brave enough to swim against the current. Brave enough to trust your gut, not just the numbers. Brave enough to go wild. And make mistakes. And admit them. Brave enough to stay consistent.

This year’s Baltic Brand Forum theme, “Stand out or disappear”, focused on the importance of standing out, but almost every speaker arrived at the same conclusion by a different route: marketers are constantly chasing something new, while one of the key characteristics of a strong brand is often the courage to keep repeating what already works. Consistency does not mean standing still; you can be timeless and timely at the same time.

We’ve all been in situations where a) a client comes in wanting something new; b) a client comes in saying, “the boss wants something new”; or c) we as an agency feel like we’ve done this already and should come up with something new. But we need to remind ourselves that even if we’re already sick of it, some of our target audience may not even have seen the ad yet. And if we want something to stick in people’s minds, we need repetition. That’s how our brains work.

It all starts with an idea

Of course, creativity plays a crucial role here. Because it doesn’t really matter how many times you show someone a boring ad, or how much of it they actually see: it won’t create an emotional connection with the brand or make them rush out to buy or use it.

A brand needs to tell a story and create emotion. We live in an age of sameness, where the importance of storytelling and a strong creative idea is growing rather than diminishing. If AI is, at least for now, making everything look similar and mediocre, creativity is what helps a brand stand out and be remembered. In that sense, there is nothing fundamentally new about marketing: the idea is still at the heart of everything, even though the channels and rules keep changing.

According to various studies, creatively awarded campaigns grow market share 8–12 times more efficiently. So creativity is directly linked to business results; it’s not just a “nice to have” for entering work into awards and bringing home trophies. I can probably speak for most agencies when I say that agencies don’t propose bold ideas just for the sake of having bold ideas. We believe, and often know, that they work better than the generic, forgettable ads we see everywhere. that fills every channel.

“You are not rich enough to be boring.” That wise words comes from Fernando Machado, who wasn’t on this year’s speaker list, but I’m sure he’ll make it to the Baltics sooner or later. Fernando is a legendary marketer who has won more than 200 Cannes Lions. He was a marketing director at Unilever when, for example, Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” won 19 awards, including the Titanium Grand Prix. His brief to the agency was short and simple: “Make women feel beautiful.”

That great ideas can come from very short briefs was also a point made at the conference by João Caputi, a strategist at KitKat’s agency VML. The brief for The KitKat Heist was: “Have fun and surprise us.” The campaign grew out of a real-life crisis. Just before Easter, 12 tonnes — 413,793 KitKats — were stolen while being transported from Italy to Poland. Instead of trying to keep the looming supply issue under wraps, KitKat and VML turned it into a public “Chocolate heist”. It was a brave decision, and it paid off big time. More than 115 other brands joined in, and the activation generated an estimated $224 million in earned media value.

It takes a partner who really knows the client inside out to convince them to go for such a bold idea. And, of course, the client has to trust the agency enormously to go along with a crazy idea like that, because with a campaign like this there is no way of knowing in advance whether it will fly. It flew very high indeed, winning, among other awards, a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2026. VML has been KitKat’s agency for 90 years.

Keep raising the bar

Angels has a client in its portfolio that we have been working with for 20 years. We have quite a few client relationships that have lasted more than 10 years, and we’ve had the chance to celebrate a fifth anniversary with many more. We value these long-term relationships enormously and feel that they allow us to deliver much greater value, because we know the business and the category inside out. We understand and safeguard the brand, and we understand the competitive landscape and its needs. Yes, you have to keep raising the bar, but that’s the whole point anyway.

The importance of a long-term client–agency relationship was also highlighted by Beth Marchant from System1, an international marketing and advertising effectiveness research company. System1 + IPA’s “The Power of Compound Creativity” study found that brands that change agencies less frequently achieve better brand and business results. According to the study, the emotional impact and distinctiveness of advertising also grow much more over time for brands with long-term agency relationships.

When a campaign is more emotional, distinctive, entertaining and consistent than others in its category, the likelihood that it will increase profit rises significantly.

The comparison with the category is key here. Too often, brands lack the courage to do something different from what’s typically done in category X or Y. Within categories, we see far too many ads that are almost interchangeable: a lovely family, a well-known creator, a beautiful landscape etc. You could put almost any brand logo underneath and it would make no difference. And then it doesn’t make a difference how big the media budget is either, because if the consumer doesn’t understand, notice or remember which brand was being advertised, the money has essentially been wasted. Or simply ended up in a competitor’s pocket. As former Ryanair Head of Social Michael Corcoran, the man behind its insane TikTok strategy, put it very plainly in his talk: “Most brands build the category with their advertising, not their brand.”

That said, there are times when it does makes sense to run campaigns that grow the entire category rather than necessarily increasing the market share of one particular brand. That’s when the question isn’t why choose brand A over brand B, but why use this kind of product or service at all.

Emotional campaigns deliver

Let’s talk a little more about categories. When a product feels like it no longer belongs to the category and appears to be losing relevance in today’s fast-moving digital and AI-driven world, you might even ask: why should it exist at all?

The product is Polaroid, and the challenge is launching new products. The temptation would be to talk about product features and innovation, but that’s something only a massively loved, gigantic brand like Apple can really get away with — its ads are, unfortunately, often little more than announcements: here’s the new product, and feature X is better than on the previous model.

According to Polaroid brand strategist Dovile Banyte the analog brand went much deeper and found something that resonated with a generation tired of digital life. The main qualities of analog photography are that it takes more time, it is imperfect, and it leaves you with a physical object. But you are also far more likely to remember that object than the thousands of photos sitting on your phone. Because we are analog creatures. We experience the world through five senses. That’s how we learn to trust people, how we fall in love, how we make decisions. In the digital world, we often use only one sense — or two, if we turn the sound on on our phones.

Polaroid said: The most meaningful moments happen away from screens.

“The best of summer is analog.” So simple, so spot-on and so relevant.

Among other things, they placed their ads near the retail locations of their competitors — digital products and services providers— including outside Apple Stores. They dared to position themselves against huge brands, they told a story, and they did it emotionally. Emotional campaigns consistently deliver more than 50% better business results than rational or functional campaigns.

Polaroid also understood how important it is to “walk the talk” — to actually do what you say — and now they have analog days every month. We’ve introduced a similar day at our own agency. We talk all the time about looking for and finding inspiration, and for several years now we’ve had an inspiration day once a month: a Friday when we can find inspiration in a museum, in the forest, or why not in catching up on some much-needed sleep. It works!

This year marked the eighth Baltic Brand Forum, a marketing conference focused on brand building, creativity and marketing effectiveness. But just as importantly, it brings together Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians working in marketing. As Baltic Brand Forum founder and CEO of Latvian agency Magic Andris Rubins puts it: “It is important for us to stand out. But it’s also important to stand together. And the smaller the country the more important it is to have good friends and allies. Especially in these turbulent times. Why should Baltic brands and agencies join forces? We can learn from each other. We can partner each other. And we can join forces to make Baltics more cool, visible and impactful globally.” 

The importance of collaboration was also discussed by Lithuania’s Povilas Klusaitis. He markets a brand called fantazijos.lt, an erotic and sex-products retail chain and online store. Obviously, they have to be brave, and he shared plenty of examples of unexpected collaborations — with a burger chain, a spa, a gym and so on. The greater the contrast between the categories, the greater the impact.

At this point, I have to take my hat off to the unexpected partners who have joined us in communicating the Estonian Health Insurance Fund’s cancer screening communication. Lingerie shops, concert halls, petrol stations and gyms have had stickers on their mirrors saying: “You can’t see it from the outside. Better to get checked.” Hardware stores have displayed posters by the pipes and hoses with the message: “Check your own pipes and hoses too.” Car washes have reminded people that it isn’t only their car they should take care of, but their health as well. On Pärnu beach, we even turned an R-kiosk into a Rinnakiosk — literally, a “Breast Kiosk”. And the list goes on.

Save the best for last: finally, I come to the last speaker — Freddie Öst from the legendary Swedish agency SNASK. Freddie opened with: “Fuck data. Stop asking people what they want all the time!” Data is about the past, or at best the present. We have to act with the future in mind. That thought really resonates with me. Too often, people trust the numbers blindly, and if the numbers look okay, they don’t dare do anything differently in case it all goes wrong. Yes, numbers matter, but you also have to know how to look beyond them. Often, that means having the courage to trust your gut and your common sense. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this in “Blink”: how we often know something without knowing exactly where that knowing comes from. We have a gut feeling, and when it is based on previous experience and a deep understanding of the field and the target audience, it is worth trusting.

A design or a campaign doesn’t have to be beautiful; “I like it” or “I don’t like it” isn’t an argument. It’s the story that sells. “Marketing is asking someone on a date. The brand is the reason they say yes.” The courage to do things differently and step outside the category works. As a good example, Öst showed an ad for waterproof Adidas Originals sneakers. Instead of making the usual “our sneakers are waterproof” ad, SNASK found Thomas, presented as one of Stockholm’s most highly regarded “professional puddle jumpers”. It is also a perfect example of SNASK’s philosophy: take a product feature and turn it into a simple, absurd and memorable story.

One fun fact: Freddie recommends taking inspiration from your Wi-Fi password. We’re all good on that front. Since we’re Angels, our server is God and the Wi-Fi password is “God knows”.

So yes, Baltic Brand Forum isn’t as big as Nordic Business Forum, but that’s part of its charm — and the content was way more than worth the price of admission. Lots of great speakers, plenty of inspiration and motivation to do even better work. There’s also real value in meeting old and new acquaintances who are connected to the industry in one way or another.

The next Baltic Brand Forum will take place in Liepāja on 7–8 October 2027. Until then — be braver!

By Annika Avikson, AD Angels 

Kõik uudised