META Advisory has had a difficult but successful year behind it – as reflected both in improved financial results and in winning the title of Agency of the Year at the Kuldmuna (Golden Egg) awards for the second year in a row. Managing Partner Andreas Kaju talks about how hard they worked last year, why they were not operating at the limits of their capacity, and whether the creativity of communications agencies even fits within the Golden Egg framework.

Congratulations, you are once again the communications agency of the year. On social media, you said that last year was the hardest, but also the most successful. What exactly do you mean by “hardest”?

The hardest, because the people at META did more work than we ever have before. It is a very particular feeling. I’m 45, and I can’t remember the last time I felt like that.

Of course, people tend to remember more recent things better. In all likelihood, the company’s early years involved much more work, and psychologically, that period was probably harder too, because there was less of a sense of security back then. I still remember that when I founded the company, I had no savings at all and was living off my partner’s civil servant salary.

I can’t say that last year we were operating at the limits of our capacity. I don’t want to leave the impression that our field is more difficult than it really is – this is work that is well within all of our capabilities. We are not da Vincis inventing the world. We are not even Medicis financing world-changers. Perhaps we are Machiavellis, advising those who change the world.

Does that mean there was simply more work, or has the field changed so that every client now requires more work?

No, quite literally, we did more work than ever before. The kind of work clients actually pay for. And that showed directly in better financial results.

It is one thing to do more work with more people, but we did more work with the same team we already had. It is my responsibility to make sure our people are productive and not pushed beyond the line into exhaustion.

I’ve been doing this work for 16 years. For me, this is no longer a lifestyle business – it has to be economically efficient. The numbers have to be good so that I can raise people’s salaries and invest in their development.

Of course, you have to be smart, but in my view, among consulting firms – and I do not mean only our own field – there are a lot of lifestyle businesses that support the founders’ lifestyle rather than being built on hard work. Our company does not exist to support the founders’ lifestyle; it exists to support employees, their aspirations, and the growth of their income.

We are not doing this for entertainment, or only for as long as we feel like it. We do not play games with our clients’ trust: I am not going to say one day that I no longer feel like doing this and shut the business down. This company is here for the long term – and it will remain among the leaders even when I am no longer running it – and that requires a different kind of commitment.

Lately, we have been investing heavily in AI together with the Rud Pedersen Group. For some time now, we have had a diverse suite of AI tools in use, all running on our own group servers and built on shared knowledge. That has brought a clear qualitative leap to people’s working lives. The entire mindset behind our work now has to be prompt-first. Whatever we do, we must begin by using AI to leverage existing knowledge and our own previous thinking. That is the new everyday reality we are now entering.

Everyone wants hardworking employees. How do you find them?

We are never rude or dismissive, but we are direct. I no longer personally recruit every employee, but over the past 16 years, I have hired more than a hundred people. In the interviews I still take part in, I try to intimidate candidates a little.

I talk about the difficulties that come with this job. You have to work on many projects at once, and paradoxically, the less experience you have, the more projects you tend to handle.

The second thing is stress from the outside environment. We are a relatively large company in our field, and there is quite a lot going on here. To be honest, it is a stressful job. Crises ripple through the company – when one colleague is in crisis, in a sense, all of us are.

The third thing is that we have our own values and red lines. There are some topics we simply do not work on, but even so, we have clients across a range of sectors, including ones that are highly polarising in society. Employees need a strong moral backbone of their own in order to cope with the ambiguity of working life.

The fourth important quality is diligence. You can identify that through previous work and former employers.

I also have a couple of completely subjective things that help me spot diligence in younger people. One has studied or lived abroad, even briefly. That can also mean working abroad as an au pair or doing some other job. It gives you a life education and makes you independent very quickly. Most young people do not have parents with deep pockets – they rely on scholarships or work while studying.

The second thing is more controversial: people who have played sports from a young age. The third is the most subjective of all – young people from rural areas. We have graduates here from top schools in central Tartu and Tallinn with excellent exam results, of course, but diligence also shows when someone comes from a small country school that ranks who-knows-where in exam league tables and still fights their way into a university abroad. That shows that you want to achieve something. Those people have a monkey on their shoulder constantly telling them: keep going, keep going.

I understand that the Golden Egg and creativity more broadly have sparked debate among PR agencies. This year, many awards went to creative agencies and clients. In one social media post, you said PR is above all an ROI game. In your view, how should a jury measure so-called real impact versus creativity? And are PR agencies even creative in the traditional sense, or should they be?

This can be discussed from many different angles. We are members of TULI, we participate in the Golden Egg, and we have always had the opportunity to contribute to the competition. I do not want to position myself as an outsider and start criticising the Golden Egg – that is not what I do. But to answer your question: it is inconceivable that awards should be handed out for work that clients do not care about at all. That would be absurd. It is not TULI’s role to reward things like that.

I am not saying that this has happened, but I need to explain my starting point. In the communications field, there should be meaningful overlap at the Golden Egg between the client perspective and the jury criteria. We assess work based on the highest standards of communication as an art form, but there also has to be common ground with clients, who care about results.

There is no point in presenting a campaign to the jury if it was never actually shown anywhere, nothing depended on it, and nothing happened as a result. That would be absurd. I am speaking hypothetically here – I am not claiming that this is how work is rewarded today. After all, we ourselves have, I think, been named agency of the year four times.

Communication is, by its nature, a practical attempt to influence reality, perception, and behaviour. It is not something we do for our own amusement, an end in itself. That is why my expectation is very clear: in communications, the best work is the work that has the greatest impact, that achieves the objectives set for it or comes very close to doing so. On top of that, there should be a number of other criteria as well, and these are clearly set out in the Golden Egg jury rules. 

This is not like ordering from Wolt or Bolt, where an algorithm gives you the best restaurant matching your exact preferences and the nearest courier to bring you the food. Of course, there is always subjectivity, and much depends on the composition of the jury, their personal preferences, life experience, grudges, and intrigues. That is fine – it is all part of the game. In Estonia’s tiny pond, it can be a bit comical, but that is okay.

Even so, what has to remain dominant is what the client looks at: effectiveness. Results are not always the same thing as ROI, but I do think that those who want to win awards need to be able to show what the client actually achieved through the campaign.

It is a separate issue that the highest-scoring team was not an agency, but an in-house team. That may well happen again in the future. By all means, the very best work that meets the criteria should be the work that gets recognised. We have discussions on this topic ahead of us with the heads of other agencies. People have approached me because, based on my posts, they assumed I saw it as a problem that agencies won fewer awards. No, that is not a problem at all.

We are evaluating the best communication work. If that is done by an in-house team, I am delighted. All the more so because the driving force behind the year’s best communications team (the President Kaljulaid Foundation – editor’s note) is our former and highly valued colleague, Cairit Rebane. Taken together with our alumni, we won both agency of the year and team of the year, so we really do not mind at all (says with a smile – editor’s note).

Agencies do not need to win if in-house teams are better. The Estonian market is so small that if we could compete for awards only against other agencies, the competition would be thin indeed.

Speaking more broadly about creativity: in interviews like this, I keep hearing that PR and marketing are moving closer together and merging. Should PR agencies perhaps start approaching things differently, too? For example, poaching creative talent from advertising agencies? In other words, does all this talk about PR and marketing being very close not suggest that agencies should somehow change their model?

You have set the table so richly that one could start eating from any end with knife and fork. I have 16 years of agency experience, but when I speak to even more experienced people abroad, or read the literature, it is clear that this field has always been in flux.

Especially the part that concerns communication’s relationship with adjacent fields – whether advertising, or even media planning, which also has some overlap with PR. Different waves have come and gone, and where the business model moves depends on what is happening in the market – what is happening with media and technology.

To me, the discussion about creativity is a little artificial. We are all solving problems set by clients, and sometimes we help the client formulate the right problem so that we can solve it together.

If one day the most effective way to do our work is to be more integrated with creative agencies, then that is what we will do. Right now, that is not the case. And if I look at financial results, creative agencies currently face more existential questions than communications agencies do.

We have seen even award-winning agencies shut down. It seems to me that the existential crises of creative agencies stem above all from a changing environment and from technology, which has hit them harder.

In one LinkedIn post, you said that “no jury in Estonia seems inclined to believe that the idea behind a communications project for Coca-Cola or Google was born in Estonia rather than in New York or LA. But never mind!” What project were you referring to?

Over the years, we have submitted work like that, but at some point, we stopped. It was simply an emotional remark on my part.

Not a specific example then?

There are definitely specific examples in my head, but it would be childish to bring them up. Just because I think something was nice or well done does not mean we should have won an award for it. Sometimes we are limited by our own provincialism or small-mindedness. We are reluctant to believe good things about one another. If there is an international client, we always assume the work is just an adaptation. That is absurd, but never mind.

What I wanted to highlight was that all those local campaign awards were also earned by the international clients we work for – the ones we do not win awards for, even though the work may be just as good or even better. I am deeply grateful to them.

How is META Advisory’s year shaping up so far? Will you be doing even more work?

Yes and no. We are always looking for the right balance. We are part of an international company with a strong work culture and a Nordic Protestant work ethic.

Right now, it is mid-March. We do not know exactly how the rest of the year will unfold, but I do know that the first quarter has been good and there is reason to be satisfied. We have returned to some old truths – in other words, we are now very selective about client relationships. At one time, we tried to win every client and then hire new people accordingly. We now understand that this does not suit us. We want long-term, meaningful client relationships.

We also want the people on the other side to be competent and committed. We want to offer our employees interesting work, not work that creates frustration and contradiction. And we have almost entirely ruled out work whose economic rationale is unclear.

If you want to do pro bono work, then do it – but there is no point in working for a client who does not value it. It makes no economic sense. I am not going to push my colleagues into projects where the fee does not even cover their salary.

Is it common for clients not to value your work?

We do not have those kinds of clients because we do not take them on. Naturally, clients go through better times and worse times. If your client is going through a bad period, you go through it with them, because you know that when they come out the other side, they will not forget you.

If, in a public procurement process, price accounts for more than 50 per cent of the evaluation, we do not participate, because that means the buyer does not value quality, and that is that. Go procure whatever you want, but we are not going to show up. Why should I talk to you if your tender conditions make it clear that quality does not matter to you?

There is a lot of anxiety in the world right now. What should Estonians’ or Estonia’s communication be like at this moment?

The challenge is to say that maybe, objectively speaking, there is nothing wrong in Estonia at all. We could function like all the other border countries that have learned to live with the fact that they are situated in a historically challenging place. Even so, they go about their lives confidently and boldly. They always prepare for the worst, but they live every day as though there were 10,000 beautiful years ahead. That is possible, but it requires tremendous self-confidence.

That is what we are missing at the moment. We live in a strange era and worry because of who our neighbour is. We have not yet found the key to self-confidence – how to believe in ourselves despite all the anxiety and stress. To believe in our education system and our economy. To think outside is Mordor, but things are in order here. We have a plan, we act, we live our lives, and from time to time we practise for the worst. We do that so that we can be confident that we know what to do if the worst should happen.

That self-confidence is still missing, and I think professionals across our field could help build it in the coming years. Communication can also be ironic and sarcastic, but I have the feeling that our society needs communication that is self-aware, realistic, and optimistic about the future, not defeatism or hopelessness.

Author: Siim Kera, TULI

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