Lithuanian CMO of the Year 2026: Maybe people should not study marketing?

Interview with Ada Mockute Jaime, CMO of Nordcurrent. Hando Sinisalu met Ada in Vilnius during the gala event.

What makes a good CMO? 

Maybe people should not study marketing per se in a narrow way? They should look at the broader business aspect. I think a marketer definitely needs to be someone who understands business.

Marketing is one of the biggest expense lines, and that needs to make sense. So I think understanding business is one of the key things. Another thing for me is that I am always looking for people who are more generalists, in the sense that they see the big picture rather than focusing on one narrow thing.

Because when you see the whole picture, you understand what can work, how different things connect, and how to make everything efficient and effective.

What about your own tactical skills? Are you able to set up a Facebook ad and optimize it? 

Yes, yes.

Do I know how to do it very well? Probably not. That is why I have a head of growth who is a very, very smart man when it comes to that.

I think one of the key things is surrounding yourself with very smart people who handle the functional and tactical side, while you oversee the strategy and how it all works for the company as a whole.

What about building in-house teams versus using outsourced agencies and partners? 

At Nordcurrent, where I am right now, it is a family business that has been around for 23 years, and we do very, very, very much everything internally, with a very small team. Considering how global we are, we have four game titles distributed globally. We have all the functions of communication, creative, and user acquisition fully in-house, and we have 28 people for that.

So I think it depends on the organization. I do think that outsourcing can sometimes be good. Again, it depends on the situation.

But for daily processes, I would probably choose an in-house team. What we have also noticed in our case is that so many new collaborations happen across different teams in marketing, and so many things now overlap. For example, user acquisition and content creators overlap, and user acquisition creatives get inspired by social media.

So in our case, I would say the in-house team wins, both for efficiency and for connecting all the dots together, if that makes sense.

Another thing is ambition, because it was really impressive to see the numbers you showed about your success in the Asian markets. Right now, with the geopolitical climate, I feel that many companies are trying to win closer to home. 

Mobile gaming is a very particular kind of product because we can be global everywhere. We are in the cloud and on servers, so if we concentrated only on local markets, it would be too little for us.

In gaming, installs do not mean finances. They do not mean money. Purchases, which come after a long journey, mean money, and our purchases are very small on an individual level, which means the work has to be constant.

So I think that for mobile gaming, if you are not global, you simply cannot succeed at all. Competition is fierce, the average purchase is small, and you need to go as wide as you can and work on retention.

You also emphasized the importance of knowing market specifics and understanding local culture. As a kind of global CMO, how much do you need to understand customer behavior among teenagers in Indonesia or China?

Instead of going into a cold market and trying to create traction there, it is always easier to amplify what is already happening. So when you choose a couple of markets, I think you need to understand, maybe not every tiny trend and detail, but definitely how the market works overall and what the communication norms are.

And I think nowadays that is not so difficult. Globalization may be shrinking in terms of products, and we may be moving back toward local realities, but information is still very accessible, and it is not that hard to learn what works.

What helps us a lot is that we find local creators who produce content. Actually, they are our best educators. They tell us what is working, what is not, and how things function.

How often do you visit those markets? How important is it to have boots on the ground? Can you really orchestrate all of that from Vilnius?

Yes, that is what we do. We orchestrate everything from Vilnius. I have been to China once.

But we do not go to markets regularly just for the sake of being there. Again, our product is global and digital. We do not need to be physically present there all the time. We are always in communication with our kind of extended hands, our ambassadors, but they are really just players who are fans of us and whom we incentivize, so that helps us.

So no, we barely go to the markets just to be there.

China is also a sensitive topic, because although big European countries and big European companies do a lot of business there, in the Baltics you increasingly hear the sentiment that you should keep away from China at any cost, maybe even not visit China at all. What is your view on that?

I think there are a couple of perspectives.

One perspective is that we do most of our business where the resources, the people, and the taxes are, which is in Lithuania. So we are really just getting sales from China. In that sense, we are using China for our own benefit.

The second thing is that when it comes to Russia, we have a very strong line. We even have studios working in Ukraine, and we have a very clear and strong position on that.

With China, we do not frame it in the same way. We look at it as a business opportunity from the perspective that we are in a very small country, our operation is not that big, and we need to be able to compete in global markets. I think we need to be brave about some decisions.

Because it really has changed. To me, it is strange that it is acceptable to buy solar panels and all sorts of other things from China, which means we are giving them money, but if we want to make money in China, then suddenly that is treated as a no-go. It is really weird.