5 Minutes With… Michael Lebowitz

Big Spaceship is 14 years old. In Internet years, that makes the digital agency as close to a heritage brand as anything else you’re likely to find online. It’s older than the iPod, iTunes and Wikipedia. In that time it’s surfed the choppy – and turbulent – waters of technology thanks to an elastic, hierarchy-free approach that so impressed the Harvard Business Review that the Spaceship has become one of it’s go-to case studies. 

LBB’s Laura Swinton headed to New York to catch up with CEO and founder Michael Lebowitz and discovered an agency that honed its craft working for the Good, the Bad and The Ugly of Hollywood, ended up in advertising by accident and that has completely jettisoned the concept of a creative department. Buckle up, advernauts, we’re about to hit orbit…

LBB> You’re a creative company with no creative department – how does that work? When did you decide to work this way and what do you think it says about creativity?

ML> The line I say way too often is ‘creativity is an obligation, not a vocation’. The work that we do is essentially and intrinsically collaborative. You can’t produce the things that we produce by yourself. 

For a long time I didn’t have anything to model the company on – this is only really my second job in the ‘digital’ industry and when we started Big Spaceship we worked almost exclusively with clients in Hollywood. I didn’t realise for the longest time that we were even adjacent to the ad industry. So I just did things that made sense to me. When I started in the industry, it was the mid ‘90s and there were no schools, no best practices, we just had to figure it out. On my very first day of my first full time job I was the producer for the Bravo TV website. I was the designer, the coder and the client contact. I was a one-person team doing all of these things for a cable network that was in 80 million homes - it was such a naïve time. But if I did all these things, we should all, as we grow, be doing all those things, and just figuring it out. That’s how I learned to do that work. 

So that’s one side of it. The other is: imagine a giant global network of 10,000 people that has a creative department or series of creative departments that takes up about 25 per cent of the company. If 25 per cent of the company is responsible for creativity that absolves 7500 people of the obligation of creativity, when we’re all in the business of solving our clients’ challenges. It just made more sense to do it our way. I think it’s empowering. A producer here who’s responsible for day-to-day client contact and keeping things on track is going to feel much more empowered when you say ‘your ideas matter’ and appreciate that they might have a different perspective. I’ve seen great people from every discipline we have coming up with ideas that solve great problems. 

LBB> How do you make that model work in a practical sense? Is it entirely fluid, or is there some structure there?

ML> Well structure isn’t exactly my strong suit. When we hired our first two employees and we worked one project at a time we didn’t think we needed producers. We could keep things organised and on-track by shouting across the room at one another. And then we started getting two projects at a time and suddenly we were like ‘oh now we see the value in a producer’. I think that basic principle has guided everything along the way. We’re very scrappy. We figure things out as we go along. We just keep adding a little bit of structure where we need it to keep things working. We have very clearly articulated values, and as long as we are true to those we just do what we need to do to keep things running the way we want them to run.

I’ve also learned that I really prefer a framework rather than process, something that sets up guardrails but then lets people figure things out for themselves. No client comes to us for repeatable outcomes and that’s what processes are for. You set up an assembly line and everything comes out exactly the same and without defect. There isn’t a client in the world that wants an agency that works like that, but a lot of big agencies have these really rigorously defined processes. 

We were native. We were born this way. But we’ve also been around a long time for a digital shop. If nothing else, the one thing that’s been consistent throughout is that it’s been fragmented and high-velocity. We were born into a time where everything was unpredictable. That was the norm. Everything formed organically. I’d love to say that it was a carefully thought out thing and I’m the most brilliant manager in the world, but it was just the case that we needed to be an elastic organisation. We just made it up as we went along and that’s stood us in good stead.

It’s allowed us to keep adding people with interesting talents. This year we added a lot of great talent around data and analytics because that’s become such a large part of what we do. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it also informs creativity. I hired Tony Clement to head up our analytics practice, and I love his point of view that data is about extracting stories. It’s an essentially creative thing. It’s creative and it’s strategic but it’s also numeric and catalytic and unpredictable. He’s evangelised data and analytics to all the disciplines in the company, so we have designers who are now thinking about data. They’re not necessarily doing regression analysis but they understand the value in it and they now know how to ask questions to get more from it.

LBB> That fluid way of working requires a great deal in terms of communication and openness. How do you facilitate that?

ML> We have our four core values that everyone needs to stick to: take care of each other, collaborate, produce amazing work, speak up. If these things are in equilibrium the company runs great. When things go awry and we have to post-mortem what happened, we look at it in terms of which of those four things went off track. 

There’s also now a Big Spaceship Manual that a bunch of people wrote here on a ‘Hack the Spaceship’ themed hack day. The idea was they could do whatever they want, break into whatever teams they want, but they had 24 hours to do something that would make this a better place. The manual that came out is one of the best pieces of work that we’ve ever produced even though it’s not for a client. One team decided to document the culture of the place. They just interviewed people all day long. My total contribution to this thing – which was about a company I created – was a thirty-minute interview. They even interviewed people who don’t work here. A month later they had made the first draft of the manual. It explains who we are really thoroughly, but the way it was made is as much an articulation of the culture as the contents of it. 

We have cultural structure in place. Every Monday we have a thirty-minute all-staff meeting and whenever we introduce a new person they get asked a question by another random person in the company. It’s just as hard – maybe harder – for the person that’s been here a while to think of the question. But the whole point is that it’s fun and funny. We also got a trophy made that says ‘world’s greatest person’. Every week the person who received it last gives it to someone else. New people get to see that going on; people celebrating each other.

For one piece of business we had to create some social video for Thanksgiving, but we had no budget for photography and video. So the team decided to throw a Big Spaceship Thanksgiving and film it. I walked into the big room next door and people had prepared 40 different dishes, people in the neighbourhood lent their ovens so we could cook things. We had roast turkey, roast ham, a tofurky for the vegans and everyone stayed late to just be with each other. It completely warmed my heart. And it all started from trying to solve a work problem. 

LBB> When you’re bringing someone into the family, so to speak, what are you looking for? 

ML> We have a really strong cultural support system but there’s not a lot of hand holding. You’re here because we think you’re good enough to do what we do. It’s not sink or swim but we don’t have enough time to coddle people. A more junior person is going to get more support obviously, but you’ve got to just be ready to run top speed. 

I always say I don’t like professionalism with a capital ‘P’. It sands off all the interesting angles of people. We have to behave professionally and be respectful of everyone but I want whole people to come to work, not just a little slice. We have a lot of introverts but people who are not ready to bring their whole selves are not really going to do well here. We need people who are open minded to everything going on. Cultural tolerance. Certainly tolerance of a little noise and chaos; we’re not the most quiet and cubicle-orientated company in the world. Interesting people. They may have a specific practice that they’re responsible for, whether it’s a writer or a designer but what else is going on? One of the questions I ask at interviews is ‘what do you do when you’re not working’? If they get excited and have an answer, that’s a real plus for them. If they say ‘well I read books about work’ and can’t really get themselves out of that… they’re probably not for us. And I’ve always said ‘no assholes’. Don’t hire assholes, no matter how talented they are. It’s not worth it. One talented person isn’t going to make the work great, and one asshole is going to make the culture and the place and work bad. 

LBB> Turning that question back on you – when you’re not at work, what do you do?

ML> What do I do?  I have two kids so I parent most of the time. I take them to their basketball class and the playground and places like that. I’m a big culture buff: movies, TV, art. We went this weekend to the Affordable Art Show with the kids – I’d question the word affordable – but just seeing contemporary art and wandering around… New York is incredible. My wife and I were always more adventure travellers than resort travellers, and then we had kids so it’s been resort travel for the past seven years. This June we’re going to do our first proper trip like we would have done before. We’re taking the kids to Italy. I love to travel and have been many places in the world, so I’ve been looking forward to this moment for such a long time. Now they’ll enjoy it and I’ll get to see it through their eyes.  

Oh and I love professional basketball – I’ve got season tickets to the Brooklyn Nets and I’ve been to many, many, many, games.

LBB> So what’s your background? How did you get into digital creativity?

ML> I was an early Macintosh kid. We had the Mac 512 - it had 512K of ram, which is really funny. Even before that I had been using computers and was fascinated by them. In the early days of Internet we had a Compuserv account that was wildly expensive. I would always get in trouble for using it too much.

In college I was a film major. We were the last class before digital non-linear editing was introduced. I actually cut pieces of film and taped them together at four in the morning. I think I learned a bit about the collaboration between creativity and technology, how they can either really limit each other or open things up. 

In the early nineties someone turned me onto Mosaic, the first visual web browser, and I went looking for things. The first website I ever went to was a German art collective called The Dead Chickens. 

As it all started to emerge it just made sense to me. It was technology, it was creativity. I just knew I loved it from the first moment I tried it.

LBB> So the Ken Burns history project Big Spaceship worked on must have been a dream for you – film, creativity and digital.

ML> Yes. For our first six years we worked almost exclusively with Hollywood, so I’ve done a lot of digital for films. A lot. But this one was special, definitely. He’s a filmmaker’s filmmaker. He’s meticulous, fascinating and does so much with so little. He might only have a few photos and he manages to create these very stirring films. It was a special project for us and we were very proud to have been involved. Through the Hollywood stuff I’ve had a lot of meeting with a lot of very famous celebrity people and it’s a very different experience from working with someone with Ken. 

LBB> And how did going from meetings with Stallone and Jim Carrey compare with getting into the advertising industry?

ML> Hollywood gave us a lot of discipline because it’s very hard to make money. Advertising is just one of the things we do. We’ve got a really different philosophy on what a modern agency should be. The idea that a brand is the sum of its interactions makes so much more sense to me than a brand being what it says about itself. There are certainly exceptions, but a lot of agencies are organised in around being an ‘advertising’ agency or a ‘product design and service design company’ or a ‘social media agency’. And those are our three practices here. They all form this cloud of interactions that becomes a brand. A brand really is only what it is in people’s minds. 

LBB> It’s quite existential!

ML> It is existential! I’m a philosophical guy! No, but we find there’s a lot of success with that approach. We created a digital platform for BMW and we understand that brand in a really interesting way now. If we were working with them on the brand communication side, which we’re not, I think we’d use a lot of what we learned about the customers and the people at the dealerships to influence things. That’s part of what the brand is. 

LBB> The Chobani project you worked on – internal company platform – also involved a lot of that kind of on-the-ground research, embedding yourselves with people as they went about their jobs.

ML> That was almost more like being a management consultancy than an agency. It was the right way to do the job. And the full research deck was fascinating. We learned everything from primary languages to device usage, male-female ratio, tenure at the company, the way employees got information. We did design workshops with them. It’s a really substantial research project and we got to design against that. We made a platform that was native to the brand – it had to be. A brand is as much about internal interactions as external. 

LBB> In terms of interesting platforms or technological trends, is there anything that’s exciting you right now?

Lots of things. There’s always lots of things. Everybody talks about the Internet of Everything, Wearables, this thing [picks up his Google Glass]. We experiment with everything. We have Occulus Rift, we have Leap Motion, we have some smart home devices that we play with, we have iBeacons. The tech team did their own hack day last Friday and they came up with some amazing stuff. One group made a box of lights that taps into live subway data and shows you when you need to leave to catch your train. 

The iBeacon stuff is probably the most interesting to me. Most people talk about it in terms of being able to offer a coupon for a thing at a particular moment in time but I think it’s more interesting to think about how you can start a narrative in one place and have it as part of your everyday existence. The guys did an iBeacon experiment on Friday. They created an app that welcomed you to Big Spaceship when you got in range of the iBeacon. In the office there was a camera that you could control from your app. When you walk into a New York building you have to have a picture taken for security – it’s a more fun way of doing that. It wasn’t really about the specifics of that project, rather it was about how it might be able to play with hyper local connectivity. 

LBB> Having been around since 2000 you’ll have seen a lot of technologies hailed as the next big thing, some become mainstream and so widely adopted while others end up falling by the wayside. Does Big Spaceship’s longevity give you a perspective on which horses to back? Or can you never predict what’s going to take flight?

ML> There are basic things – electronics get smaller and more powerful over time. Is Google Glass ready for prime time? Would my mom wear it? Absolutely not. But when it’s just like a normal pair of glasses and the augmented overlay is a little more seamless, then I can see it as something that people might want to use en masse. I like to experiment with new things. So here’s this thing [Glass] that’s a little bit silly-looking but completely fascinating and I had to see what it was like to use. 

We’ve got an Infographic that shows Big Spaceship and the modern history of the Internet. We’re just a year younger than Wi-Fi and a year older than iTunes, the iPod and Wikipedia. Some things really took off and others faded. We never fell into technology for technology’s sake. It’s all human behaviour. If you put human behaviour first it allows you to surf through all these new developments. They either service new behaviours or borrow or alter them in some way. 

There has been a tendency in advertising and a desire on the part of clients to create new behaviours. It’s really hard to convince someone to change their mind. But if a behaviour is already a natural occurrence in one part of their lives it’s going to be lower friction to draw it over to another part. 

There’s also the macro-economic view of where things are going. I chair the Internet Advertising Bureau’s agency board and two weeks ago we led our second trip to Silicon Valley to do total immersion in all these companies. For the second year running we got to go to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, the leading tech venture capital firm. Mary Meeker, who is called ‘The Oracle’ and releases her Internet trend report every year, presented her report in person, giving colour. There were giant amounts of macro-economic data that’s been rigorously synthesised. 

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the world having the Internet in its pocket. That’s a pretty major thing and the innovation curve is going to keep happening. China was a place that used to mimic technologies and innovations from other countries, now there’s new innovation coming out of China. It’s going to lead the world in digital technology. 

It’s an interesting time. Getting to learn about things like that and getting to play with things… I don’t know if it lets me see the future but it certainly lets me enjoy my sense of what’s coming.