In this interview with Siim Kera from TULI (The Estonian Marketing Association), we talked about greenwashing, silly ad messages, life abroad, and the productization of human beings.
Questions by Siim, answers and translation by Karola.
Read the Estonian version in TULI’s blog.
Years ago, while interning at a PR agency, Karola spotted a book on content marketing on one of the office bookshelves. This instantly sparked her interest in digital marketing. Little did she know where this road might take her.
Presently, Karola has become one of the best-known marketers in Estonia. She’s got over 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and a popular marketing blog (the one you’re reading right now). Behind are the long working days as the Head of Marketing at Bolt, Scoro, and MeetFrank. For the past few years, Karola has been freelancing for companies across the EU and the US.
When moving to Paris, France three years ago, Karola re-found her literary calling. It had always existed, since early childhood. In 2022, she published two short stories in the Estonian literary magazine Looming and was awarded the annual Debuting Writer Award by the magazine. Karola has also written book reviews for the cultural weekly Sirp and for Looming. Currently, she is working on her debut novel and beginning her MA studies at the Royal Holloway University of London. The MA course is not in Marketing – she’ll be studying Creative Writing.
P.S. If you’d like to sign up for a monthly newsletter on Karola’s London life and reading recommendations, go here (and wait for 2sec for the popup).
How does it work? The more you write, the less you want to work on marketing projects?
That’s how it tends to be but marketing continues to interest me as a subject. I don’t live with the illusion that writing could be a sufficient source of income, not in Estonia and especially not in Western Europe. While I dislike the word ‘hobby’, that’s the relationship I want to maintain with literature and writing – to keep it pure in a sense. I’m not forced to write or publish anything unless I want to. If writing were to become my day job, it would soon become repulsive.
I once calculated the hourly pay of writing for an Estonian publication. Sometimes it is 50x lower than the marketing salary, sometimes 10x lower. It is a sad reality as for many talented people writing actually is the main source of income. Some newspapers and weeklies pay their collaborators incredibly low fees and, on a few occasions, I have declined their invitation to contribute a piece. That would mean feeding a system that doesn’t treat people fairly.
What is it about marketing that attracts you?
I like the psychological side to it. It’s a bit like a game. You build a world and then stand back and see whether it works. As I launched my personal marketing blog, I was thrilled to write on a variety of subjects, SEO-optimize the articles, and watch my blog grow to 100,000 monthly organic readers. It’s like playing a computer game where you can steer the outcome.
Were you at the right place at the right time? Back then, there were much fewer marketing blogs.
The blogs were there but as in many other industries, the problem arises when blog articles are written by content marketers without any actual industry experience. These copywriters aren’t practitioners but look for information in other blogs; they collect and compile the existing information but do not add anything new or of practical value.
A practitioner myself, I wrote about the tips and guidelines that were actually relevant. I happened to make it in a more logical and detailed manner than other blogs. My articles got published by many big-name marketing blogs in the US (Entrepreneur, AdEspresso, CMI, Social Media Examiner) as they were more insightful than those written by some random copywriter.
To speak of LinkedIn in for a second, I am often put off by – and this is done by a lot of Estonian marketers – people who rewrite some viral posts and fail to add anything new to the topic. I always try to share observations and ideas of my own. I won’t go commenting on the Barbie movie when it’s already been done a million times. There is a symptomatic lack of originality in Estonian (but not only) marketers’ personal brands.
I still hold the opinion that even in 2023 – especially now when so much content is created by AI – it isn’t all that difficult to succeed with a blog or on LinkedIn. But the quality has to be exceptionally high, there also has to be originality. You’ve got to have a personal opinion, an angle, and you have to do proper marketing for your content. It all takes a lot of time. It’s not the case of spending a few hours every week, rather you’ll be working on it 20h/week.
You have always been interested in literature. How did you arrive at writing?
When I left my job at Bolt, I fell into a deep identity crisis. I realized I didn’t want to dedicate my whole life to working 10-12h per day; getting old, dying without making anything meaningful with my one and only life. This raised the question: so what should I do? We’re living on a planet that wilts with every minute as climate change progresses. Should I go and work for Greenpeace? Should I so to say sacrifice myself and make something truly good?
I know there is not that level of altruism in me. Literature seemed like the right path forward: I’ve always been attracted to it, it’s occupied with the soul rather than the material; it doesn’t create new waste into the world but explores that which is human about us. I am interested in climate change as a topic, especially the question: how to live in this world as a human being while knowing that every day that you live and consume and breathe, you are destroying the very planet you’re living on.
Fiction, and literature in general, holds the potential to analyze things more broadly, to see a problem from multiple angles. It doesn’t tell you what’s the one right answer but helps, in an abstract way, to look for those answers; it invites you to think along. Half a year ago or so, I began to dabble with my very first novel and it’s a hundred – ok, perhaps a million or billion or trillion – times harder than any marketing project I’ve ever worked on.
When I moved to Paris, I began reading more fiction and made my first attempts at writing. I read voraciously, learned and learned and learned. Only after two years did I feel daring enough to write one tiny short story. I am still haunted by the question of whether I’m ready. One could keep studying literature and writing forever. In marketing, there comes a point where you feel that you’ve hit the ceiling, that now it’s become boring. But literature is endless like the ocean: you swim, and you swim some more, and there might be some small island along the way but you’ll never reach the continent.
There is also a beauty to writing on an everyday human level. Instead of messaging or sending pictures via social media to my grandparents, I write them letters. This means of communication feels a lot more meaningful and caring. Sometimes, I think that perhaps my grandparents have forgiven me for living abroad because I’m being cute and sending them all those letters.
Is the environment a subject that marketing actually deals with?
I am highly cynical about this one. Just recently I heard an advertisement that told people to bring their old teflon pans to the store so they can get the new one cheaper and this is the greenest deal in the world. It is often sickening to realize how ignorant such messages are and how mindless it is to believe that buying a new frying pan can in any way be good for the planet.
Recently, someone shared on Instagram how they bought a new kitchen device for filtering water. The new machine has an iron filter instead of a plastic one so now they will never have to use plastic again. Had they thought about the ecological footprint of producing and transporting this new machine, they might as well have used the old plastic device forever.
In a similar way, it isn’t green to buy a new electric vehicle when the old car still drives. The electric car has to be produced and transported, the ecological footprint of electric batteries is very high. It’s hypocritical to tell people to buy ‘green’ as buying a new item is never green. What’s green is not buying.
Sometimes, I have told my clients not to launch another campaign where they plant a tree for each purchase. Because it’s plain greenwashing. This kind of tree planting isn’t green. These trees are not going to grow old and sequester carbon and even, if by some miracle they will, a single tree isn’t going to save the world. I have pushed back on quite a few greenwashing campaigns, shared some scientific articles with my clients, and explained the bigger picture.
Speaking of clients, I am offered a lot of potential projects but it’s not always easy to find the few I am willing to accept. I refuse all gibberish products and fast fashion, also food industry projects. Gambling and crypto are also a no-go. What I find acceptable are projects related to tech products, culture and education, as well as some medical and financial products. I also resist marketing any lifestyle products as I think most of these shouldn’t even exist in this world (laughs – ed.).
Last year, I was offered to join as a marketer in a project where they built an e-commerce algorithm that turns the search function more efficient and makes people buy more. The end goal was to sell the product to Amazon. I would have been given some shares in the company and, possibly, made a lot of money, but I found it deeply immoral to spend time on making people buy more things that they do not actually need. Add to this the fact that someone is building a product with the sole goal of selling it to Amazon and getting rich.
On the other hand, I do realize that not all marketers have the luxury to choose which projects to accept, which ones to decline. I do not hold it against anyone if they do marketing for brands that are unethical in my book. Life requires compromise, sometimes we need to find a middle ground.
Aren’t you running out of products to market? Tech and digital projects also have a big ecological footprint.
Indeed, but there are many interesting recycling and re-using platforms, projects related to education and culture. Whenever possible, I try to buy things second-hand. And digital products still have a much smaller carbon footprint, however, it’s not non-existent.
When was the last time you bought something new?
Very recently! I bought some film for my camera. Of course, I do slip sometimes and buy clothing and other stuff that I don’t really need. It is hard to resist at all times, especially when it comes to aesthetic preferences. I always feel guilty but nonetheless buy the thing. As a marketer, however, I prefer not to pour any more oil into the fire of increasing consumption; I am already part of the system as a consumer.
I suppose many readers would like to know how you manage to work for one half of the year and then take the other half off?
I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found the projects that allow me to work and live this way. For five years, marketing and blogging was all I lived for. Back then, it was super interesting for me and it still pays off, although my blog has fallen victim to neglect (laughs – ed.).
This year, I’ll end up having ca eight months of marketing work, not six. At one point, I was working on four projects at once, spending 60h/week behind the laptop screen. It’s just a highly concentrated effort. In a way, I still work full-time but it is simply more condensed and allows me to take a few months off.
You were living in Paris as a freelancer. This sounds like a dream for many people. Was this life how you imagined it?
It was a strange life. I was living on my own and during COVID, the lack of human contact was psychologically straining. On the other hand, I enjoyed working from home – I’m more efficient this way and can move in my own rhythm.
Was this how I imagined it? It was idyllic for sure. After a day of work, I went on a walk in the parks and by the riverside, eventually found friends, learnt to speak more fluent French. I had bars and cafes and boulangeries where people already recognized me and sent a Salut! my way from behind the counter. It was all very agreeable but, well, it was nonetheless a life where you’d have to work all day long. You can’t just go and walk around Paris all day eating croissants.
You’ve been working with both Estonian and foreign companies. Is it in any way different?
I was recently working for a client operating in Luxembourg, London, and Spain while expanding to New York. I admired the level of professionalism in the team’s communication, it was both polite and considerate. Even on Slack, people wrote in an organized way and only when they had a good reason for writing. The quality of meetings and presentations was top-notch. And this kind of environment makes you put in more effort, too.
International brands have a higher willingness to invest in marketing and develop large-scale campaigns. They’re not afraid of launching an outdoor campaign that costs half a million euros, or a million. Because they know that it will actually work. On the other hand, Estonian brands believe they can expand to New York by running Facebook ads for €10,000 and seeing how the market reacts. It will not react. Even a campaign that costs €500,000 and covers every 10th subway car in New York might not launch the market.
Estonian entrepreneurs are under the impression that as it was easy to launch in the Estonian market and make some profit there, it is just as easy to launch in any other market. Just run a bit of Facebook ads and done. A long time ago when Facebook ads were actually cheap, this could actually work, but it’s become a lot harder these days.
I’ve seen an Estonian brand expanding to a nearby country and for six months, they spend a low budget on Meta and Google ads. And it’s not going to work. If they spent the same budget in a single month, on one strategic multichannel marketing campaign, they’d achieve a much higher brand recognition. In the end, this one-month campaign would be a much more efficient way to spend the budget.
Another issue I see in Estonia and elsewhere is that the company’s management fails to give relevant input to all teams and employees. There are good and bad CEOs. A good leader knows where their company is headed, they’ve got a clear vision. A good leader knows that X budget or X runway allows the company to grow to Y and makes their team work towards that goal. And then there’s the opposite type of leader that tells “let’s try something and see where it takes us.” In the second type of companies, it is highly stressful to achieve any marketing results. You simply don’t know what to do. Each week, there’s some new idea and everything needs to be reworked, rebuilt from scratch. And none of the ideas and hypotheses are ever properly tested.
Prior to accepting to work with a company, I want to hear from the CEO their expectations to the marketing team. How else should I know where to focus and which goals to set for my team? Numbers are a critically important motivation for any team. Occasionally, when the product is truly good, I still accept the project and will create the company’s growth goals on my own.
However, this “let’s just try” attitude is not going to take you far. Results have to be thought through and strategy should stem from those high-level goals. Building a strong brand message takes months, sometimes years. You just can’t try a new one every few weeks.
I’s like to encourage other marketing leads and practitioners to keep pushing the company’s leadership to spell out what numbers they want to see. If a leader doesn’t know what they want, perhaps then they’re not a very good leader. The CEO might be a great product lead but if they’re incapable of thinking about growth and numbers, it can be disorientating and stressful for the rest of the team.
Let’s speak about literature marketing as well. How to get more young people to read, how to popularize literature? With literary magazines, the problem seems to be that although they’re state-funded, there isn’t any budget for marketing.
Certainly, all the literary magazines lack money. Seen from the state’s perspective, I don’t know… just organize one less sports competition and give that money to some magazine so that they can afford proper marketing (smirks – ed.).
Tiit Hennoste recently wrote in Sirp how in the 1960s, the budget for a single issue of Looming magazine equaled 35 average salaries. Right now, the magazine’s monthly budget is 3.5x the average salary. There is a lot of talk about valuing and preserving the Estonian language but, ironically, the Estonian language was in fact more valued during the Soviet times.
Surely there should be a marketer working for each cultural magazine but there isn’t any budget for this. Värske Rõhk (a monthly Estonian literary magazine publishing younger authors) is fairly active on social media but I assume that it’s one of their editors doing the marketing on top of their actual job. The same with Müürileht (another monthly magazine) – for them, strong social media marketing has been one of the keys to building a large readership.
Naturally, you also need good content. Marketing isn’t just about posting, posting, posting. You need people to talk about your magazine, you need to get people excited about the articles. The quality needs to be extremely high.
In large countries, every author has an agent who finds interview and speaking gig opportunities, and maintains the writer’s website. On top, there’s the publisher that does all the marketing for authors and their books.
Do any Estonian writers have websites? Not that I know of. I do but I designed it myself, hired a developer, and had it set up. I myself design all of my blog’s visuals, write and post the articles, and do the marketing and analysis part. The actual writing of texts takes maybe half of the time required to maintain a blog. No wonder writers don’t have time or skills for all this.
In the Anglophone literary industry, all authors have a personal website, they’re on Twitter and on Instagram. I have looked for some well-known Estonian authors on Instagram. Nada. No profiles. I’m not saying that it’s the writer’s job to have a social media presence but it could be something that their publisher does. Of course, the publishers don’t have any money, either. The Estonian literary scene is very small, including print runs and sales.
Yup. The timidity is interesting in the sense that the world is headed toward everyone’s life and profile being public, everyone has to build a personal brand.
I began to think about the term ‘personal brand’ and its meaning. What is it? In a way, the term signifies the productization of a human being. A living person is turned into a product that others can consume. What a sick concept, huh? Bring to mind how people speak about ecosystem services. A chanterelle grows in a forest and it’s nature’s service. A terrible discourse.
Recently, I have grown more sensitive to the language used in advertisements. I am constantly bothered by slogans that, were you to think about it for even a second, you realize are utterly idiotic. Ülemiste Keskus, a big shopping mall, advertised with the slogan “Everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”
I should like to hope that nobody’s dreams are on sale in a shopping mall. This is borderline insulting to the readers of the slogan and the store’s visitors. To say that all you can dream of is laid out in a random Estonian shopping center.
So you walk the street and think what the hell?
I think that it’s sad that nothing more meaningful is done. It’s basically insulting – above all, insulting to the brand that signed off on the campaign. Instead of shouting silly marketing slogans, people could think about the meaning of their words. Advertising language has become awfully sloppy and blatant. Marketers should give each word and sentence a little more thought.
Is there anything else that marketers could do better? Are there any trends to watch out for?
It depends on the marketer’s role. When it comes to brand messaging, marketers should avoid overused slogans and use their own heads to think. There could be fewer social media posts, fewer campaigns, less noise. Try to really think about the brand and what you want to say, focus on organic marketing, on word of mouth. There’s no point in creating marketing campaigns that speak to no one, just for the sake of creating something.
For instance, let’s take the company blogs. Marketers and agencies create a ton of content for those but if you start to think why anyone should want to read it, well, you don’t really know why. On social media, there is also an overload of meaningless posts, without any meaning or soul. You might as well leave that stuff unpublished or perhaps hire someone else (laughs – ed.).
I have this feeling that marketing is headed towards further brand-building. You can’t anymore rely on just Google and Meta ads, it’s become very expensive. I see many companies switching from paid advertising to organic social media. However, the latter is also often paid as you need to pay the content creators.
Marketers should learn how to work with TikTok and how to hire influencers to create content that can later be used as ads. And it’s about time to master the art of Instagram Reels. Both of these trends can be difficult to stay on top of. You’ve got to break your comfort zone and learn new skills all the time.
Above all, collaborating with content creators and cross-posting on Instagram and TikTok are the two things worth testing right now. There’s also a lot of talk about AI but I’m not a fan.
Why? I didn’t ask about AI as I figured that there isn’t much new to say about it, anyhow. But perhaps you do?
AI tools can be helpful when creating visuals and that’s worth looking into it. When it comes to writing marketing copy, I wouldn’t ever use it myself. Texts written by AI bots, without any original add-ons, won’t even get you ranking in Google search.
Indeed, AI can be used to compile drafts or to collect talking points. But I wouldn’t go any further than that. You’ll lose originality as another hundred marketers have used the same AI for the same kind of text. And anyhow… If we, as humans, delegate the last of our capacity to think to AI, will there be anything human left in us?
Coming back to marketing trends, it is also worth mentioning that there’s been rapid economic growth for the past 10+ years. It was possible to successfully launch lifestyle products like sustainable toothpaste, there are a million small fashion brands now. Competition has reached an unprecedented height and as the economy begins to cool down, so will those small brands fail.
What might help is focusing on a specific niche and building a strong brand, a loyal audience. Instead of focusing on growth right now, companies should look into loyalty programs and community-building. Not so far in the future, there simply won’t be enough room in the market for everyone to stay.
So the relationship has to be more meaningful than just brand and consumer?
That’s it. And more than the simple fact that you sell your product cheaper than a competitor. You’ve got to have a high-quality product and a clear product-market fit. But even that won’t be enough: you also need a strong brand that attracts and engages people.
What I’m hearing is that often the problem isn’t bad marketing but there are many average products that are hard to sell?
Yes. One of the reasons why I reject new projects is that there isn’t yet a proven product-market fit. I decline a project because I know I wouldn’t be able to market and sell the product.
Marketing won’t save a bad product but it can certainly help to bankrupt you faster (laughs –ed.).
Autor: Siim Kera, TULI