Paulius Senūta, CEO of Baltic-based Not Perfect Network, is encouraging international clients to take advantage of its agility, flexibility and empathy.
When your country is “in shackles”, as Not Perfect Network CEO Paulius Senūta describes 1990s Lithuania, you have to take a creative approach to entering the media industry. For Paulius, that meant starting out in outdoor advertising; including building the billboards.
“It was a very different concept to what we think of as ‘outdoor’ today,” he says with a smile. “We would go to the DIY store and buy plywood, so we could construct signage and stuff like that. It was a way of making money. I was just a kid at the time.”
He also scrounged odd jobs in TV and radio, helping to produce shows. “I can hardly say I was a producer – I was really young. I think I did my first job was I was about 13.”
His true passions were art and rock music. As he freely admits, he was a very average drummer, so he ended up managing bands rather than playing with them. Eventually he went to art school (the art faculty at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, to be exact) but found it to be chaotic and uninspiring. He started skipping lessons to sell computer parts. At a certain point he felt that he needed to get a “serious” education, so he enrolled in the Stockholm School of Economics Riga, a university in Latvia supported by the King of Sweden.
“I wasn’t interested in economics – I’m still not. But I was attracted to it because it was a ‘proper’ university. For some reason they took me on and I graduated from there. So now I had this classic background: arts and business. And with that I went straight into advertising.”
Imperfection makes us unique
He started out as an account planner at a Latvian agency. Then he returned to Lithuania to set up an agency backed by the same shareholders. This transformed into Not Perfect after a management buy-out in 2006. “I wanted the buyout because I thought the business should be run by the people who were doing the job. Creative people. There was nothing wrong with the previous shareholders, but they were financial, not creative.”
He'd been tempted to go client-side, but he noticed that many clients in the region were complaining that they couldn’t find a decent agency. So he decided to fill that gap. And the name? “The official version is that humans are not perfect, and we embrace that. Human beings have quirks, which could be seen as defects, but they’re actually what make us unique.”
And the unofficial version? “I think at that time, a lot of people wanted to suck the blood out of the work, so it would become correct in every aspect, but also stale. We loved work that had a certain edge, a certain roughness to it. Because that’s what gets attention. Plus we were always telling our clients to be brave, take risks. So we felt we needed a brave name.”
Today Not Perfect Network has agencies in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Partnered with Stagwell, it has created multi-awarded campaigns for local clients and worked on projects outside the region, often design-related. While the region is economically healthy despite the conflict on its doorstep, Paulius says about 20% of the network’s business now comes from beyond the Baltics. He doesn’t hide the fact that he’d like more. He believes the network has something genuinely different to offer.
“The fact that we come from a tough environment has bred a sort of discipline into us. In our agency we have people who are still very ambitious and care about the quality of the craft, first and foremost. But we can also deliver high-quality work at amazing speed.”
We were always telling our clients to be brave, take risks. So we felt we needed a brave name.
The talent solution
He mentions a US client that Not Perfect had been chasing for a year, but which didn’t give the agency an opportunity until a crisis arose. “We delivered work in three weeks that was taking another agency nine months – and they still haven’t finished. That’s not to denigrate other agencies, because cutting corners doesn’t help anyone, but we have an operating method that allows us to be agile.”
It's called Creative FastForward, he says. “When you develop work, you typically do it in stages. You start with strategy, then you go to idea and then you go to execution. It’s linear and very, very slow. Instead, we have multiple streams of development using a lot of talent. Over 48 hours, we have about 20 people thinking through the brief. And at the end of that time we have several answers, all of which we’ve prototyped. We’re not just theorising: ‘OK, this is a great strategy, we’re going to get a good execution.’ We have something concrete to show. In that way we can cut lead times, sometimes tenfold.”
The method requires resources, and Paulius says Not Perfect Network is always on the lookout for talent. “Not only do you need talent, you need talent that really appreciates this kind of approach. Some people prefer to work at their own pace, on a single strategic direction, rather than on several strategic directions at once. And I get that. But frankly, what I’ve seen is that the best talent is interested in solving challenges. And you don’t arrive at the best solution unless you try several routes.”
I consider myself a strategist.
Everything is judged on the end result
I’ve often thought that there are two types of agency CEO: those who like to roll up their sleeves and get embroiled in the creative; and those who prefer to concentrate on ensuring that the business runs smoothly. Which is Paulius?
“I consider myself a strategist,” he replies. “At the beginning of my career I really liked digging, reading a lot, connecting a lot, generating data, working with the clients.”
But all this meant that he was less focused on the creative – until one particular meeting led to a revelation. Twenty years ago he got the chance to have lunch in London with Jim Williams, the illustrious planner who created the Brand Asset Valuator system.
“One of the questions that I asked him was, ‘Jim how do you how know if your strategy is the right one? How do you judge that?’ And he said, ‘By the final TV ad.’ I was shocked, because I thought you could maybe have a brilliant strategy and the creatives would somehow screw it up. But he reminded me that it’s down to all of us. ‘It’s what’s on the air that matters, whatever happened in the past.’ So since then I’ve always seen strategy as a service to creatives.”
As a CEO, he adds, he does everything that’s expected of him to ensure that the business remains buoyant. “But, really, my heart is in creative.”
