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5 minutes with... in association withAdobe Firefly
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5 Minutes with… Chris Huban

27/09/2022
Advertiser/Brand
San Jose, United States
338
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Big Spaceship’s executive creative director of product speaks to LBB’s Addison Capper, in association with Adobe, about lessons learned from working at Spotify and not taking the power of creativity lightly

Adobe XD is a proud supporter of LBB. Over the upcoming months, as part of the sponsorship of the ‘5 Minutes with…’ channel, we will be spending time with some of the most innovative and creative minds in the industry.

In the hot seat today is Chris Huban, executive creative director of product at Big Spaceship in Brooklyn, NY. Chris believes that design excellence is achieved by understanding who we design for and how we design for them - an ethos that has driven a career that has engaged communities through involvements with NY Cares and STOKED; educated students at SVA, FIT and the New York City College of Technology; connected New Yorkers with their NYU Langone doctors; raised AIDS awareness within the culinary community through (RED); communicated a water literacy curriculum for New Orleans with Ripple Effect; and constructed a global stage for the discovery and sharing of ideas for TED, among other things.

Prior to joining Big Spaceship, Chris spent a decade at Huge and was a global creative lead (consultant) at Spotify. 

LBB’s Addison Capper caught up with him.



LBB> You've been at Big Spaceship for about a year. and I've always found it to be quite an intriguing agency. How do you see the agency? What does it do well and where does it sit in the wider industry? 


Chris> I think every agency has that one thing. For me, Huge was really all about the craft and design. They really pushed you to find perspective, which is what I learned during my decade there. 

At Big Spaceship, we’ve been ruminating and reflecting recently and it's been really exciting. We came to this conclusion that, sure, everybody wants to work with ambitious brands and, sure, we want to be an agency that does ambitious things - but what does that actually mean? And what is the value of ambition? Because that's going to be very different for everybody. 

We've landed on being an agency of progress, which has enabled us to think more broadly about what progress might mean for each of us individually as people, for our agency, and for the brands that we partner with, whether they're startups or enterprises. Whether B2B or B2C, e-commerce, content strategy, or straight campaign work… it's really about asking, ‘what does progress mean?’ How can we help businesses progress in the ways they're hoping to so that it's beneficial not just to them but also to the people they are trying to serve? As a full-service agency, we think about this across multiple mediums: ads, TV, apps, websites, social, etc.


LBB> You’re a designer who studied graphic design but now has a bit more of a specialism in creative tech and digital. How did you wind up taking that path?

 
Chris> I went to Pratt [Institute] in Brooklyn, and I graduated in 2002 shortly after 9/11. It was very difficult to find a job. I freelanced for about a year-and-a-half designing everything from the posters that wrapped over the sides of buildings, to vinyl siding for trucks, to business cards, to CDs and posters, you name it. I finally landed a full-time job, working in-house at this gigantic corporation called Cendant. I think corporate in-house teams in the early to mid 2000s got a bad wrap but our in-house team was great! There were like 11 of us, we got published in Graphic Design USA, we were part of the New Jersey Art Directors Club, which was connected to New York. So even though it was a corporate gig and in-house, I had over 50 different clients that I was working with from Century 21 and Monster.com to Sotheby's auction house. 

I did that for a few years and then at some point I was presented with two paths: I could either become an expert in ink or an expert in paper. Both were seen as being a specialised path that you could take that would basically elevate your career to the next step. This was while I was an art director but I knew that I didn’t want to be an expert in either of those things. The way I saw it was that after 500+ years, nothing much had really changed in the way those two things worked together and I just wanted to do something different and new.

I remember one day seeing a buddy of mine who I really admired working in Flash, which was a foreign tool to me. I was immediately drawn to the animation and movement that he was creating. This part at least felt familiar. I'd always loved cartoons and computers, I'm an ‘80s kid so I grew up glued to the TV and playing video games where you had to put the floppy disk in and type code to launch a game. I even remember when they mailed you the internet on a CD. 

So, I spent six months, staying up to whatever time it took, after the lights would go off, sitting in my cubicle learning Flash in the dark. 



LBB> So, was it a bit of a career shift after that? 


Chris> Well, in six months I built myself a portfolio website that literally didn't work ever, for anyone. Then one day I went to a job interview at a digital firm in the city and the owner’s like, ‘so do you have a website?’ I bring it up and I'm just sweating bullets in the chair and funny enough, that’s the only time it ever worked. 

I switched careers and went from being a print art director in New Jersey all the way down to a junior interactive designer at a small design firm in Manhattan that had maybe seven of us. There was myself and two other designers at the time. We had to do everything - user experience wasn’t even around yet. We had ‘business data and analytics’ so we had to do all the ‘BA’ work, all the design work, and we had to understand how to code whatever we were designing. 

Our small size was really great because you were able to be seen as a name, not a number. I’ve always been drawn to that. I also just kept throwing myself into situations where, even if I didn't really know how to do it, I was not afraid to raise my hand and say I’d figure out how to. Over the years, I found myself trying to get involved with anything that was digital first. 



LBB> When you joined Huge, they would have been a digital agency. But I guess there's no such thing as a ‘digital agency’ anymore - every agency does digital. Do you still feel that you have that ‘digital’ expertise in your role as an ECD? 


Chris> There are probably some digital agencies out there that only do one thing and do those things very well. There's this debate between being a generalist or a specialist and I think people often mistakenly assume that one is more valuable or better than the other. I actually think that both are equally valuable and important, it's just the understanding of knowing how to toggle between them. There's a time where being a specialist is required and there's a time where being more general can be more advantageous in that moment. 

With agencies, I think it's about navigating those two modes. Every agency is ultimately trying to become full service. If you look over the past two decades, that’s what has happened. When IPG and WPP were gobbling up everybody, it was because they wanted all the agencies in their portfolios to provide their clients with a more robust and full-service offering. A lot of big agencies and small studios got all caught up in that. You had small studios that were solely digital either being acquired or being fused, or growing themselves by bringing in the marketing or the traditional advertising side of the fence and vice versa. Huge even did that to a degree which was part of an evolution to remain competitive. 

Big Spaceship’s evolution is ongoing and our path to becoming full-service has been by growing from within. We're very happy with our size and what we can do with small teams. That’s where we're finding the most success in our ability to activate ourselves and create valuable and meaningful work. We've been independent, we remain independent, and it’s given us autonomy that I think a lot of other agencies and businesses perhaps struggle to find. When you have that kind of autonomy top-down, it gives everybody the space to adapt and grow together. 

And while I adapt and grow and contribute to the many things we do as an agency, my particular expertise remains in the ‘digital’ realm. We have to understand how digital has changed our world if we’re to continue to propel ourselves forward within it. I feel it’s especially required when considering how we’ll envision and build the digital products, platforms, and services of whatever future we find ourselves within.



LBB> You spent some time at Spotify Advertising in between Huge and Big Spaceship. What did you learn while working client-side and for a tech platform that you've taken into your role at Big Spaceship?


Chris> Scale and connecting the dots was a big one. I was the global creative lead, overseeing creative to certain degrees across 12 regions. There were some challenges. Spotify was trying to figure out how to find brand cohesion, how to help its regional sales teams speak the same language and grow their footprint across markets, while taking into consideration all of the differences between each region. 

Speaking to APAC is very different from speaking to Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and North America audiences. They needed to balance communicating universally shared ideas while leaving room for nuance. I found that an interesting challenge. It was a great lesson because when you’re not exposed to the range of differences between audiences, then it's difficult to design for their needs. It was very fast and you're trying to figure it out on your feet. What’s universal? What’s different? How do you adapt? How do you design a template that anyone can take and then use it in the way that they need to? 

It was a lot of talking to different stakeholders in different areas of the business to understand their needs but also thinking about language barriers; how a particular colour might mean something different to people in this area of the world versus elsewhere. There were additional layers of consideration that had to be thought through and paid attention to - and I found that complexity very exciting. 



LBB> How did that process of ‘connecting the dots’ go?


Chris> The ‘connect the dots' thing is kind of everywhere. I don’t find it all that challenging a thing to solve, it's just about talking to a lot of people, understanding what everybody's focused on, and prioritising needs to achieve shared goals. You have a data team, you’ve got a tech team, you've got a marketing team, you've got a strategy team, etc. You have these individual one-on-one conversations and along the way you’re like, ‘hey, that's really interesting, this person is saying something very similar. Do you know them?’. I'd say seven out of ten times, the answer was no and so I’d help make those connections. Every business and agency struggles with this. Who knows what the reason is? Sometimes it’s just hard to keep track of a lot of people doing a lot of different things. Big Spaceship is small enough where it’s easier to help ensure visibility and find alignment across disciplines and teams.



LBB> In terms of advertising on that platform and in that realm, what did you take away from working at Spotify Advertising?


Chris> One of my bosses spoke about the transition of advertising. It started out being very physical, we drove cars, we had GE refrigerators, it was very much object oriented and part of our daily lives in that we didn’t really think too much about them. Certainly, we had radio, but it was somewhat disconnected from visual and physical form factors. I believe it was Bulova Watches during the 1941 Dodgers World Series that the first [television] commercial put a product in the spotlight, and so began this new visual age of advertising that brought brands and products to life in new and exciting ways.

When digital came about there was a hard transition that brands struggled to make from traditional media into the digital space. I think we're still seeing that and are going to continue to see that for some time. I don't think the need for websites and responsive design will ever go away nor will its challenges. There are plenty of businesses out there that still have a ‘pinch to zoom’ to see their website on your phone, which is wild in 2022.

He also talked about how digital audio advertising is very different to radio. If people can't comprehend how their brand should exist in the digital space, then it's almost too far a leap for them to understand their brand in the audio space. If they're not ready for digital branding, they're not ready for sonic branding. It's a fascinating challenge. How do you show people the difference between traditional radio and digital audio and help them advertise on that platform in an interesting way that helps them recognise opportunities to reach new listeners? 

As I think about the future, with the talk of ‘metaverse’ or virtual worlds and mixed reality - which is where I think we will ultimately end up - I’m thinking about sensories and the different delivery methods that are out there to cater to those sensories. Audio is definitely one that we often don't think about as a primary way of delivery, it's usually a secondary or tertiary thing, if at all. But it's really exciting now that we're thinking about how we're exploring depth in space, three dimensions, four dimensions, and how audio can now play a more important role. We have a wide open space and a platform for audio to really come into play in a more interesting and impactful way than it has in the past. 



LBB> Outside of work, what is inspiring you? 


Chris> I'm inspired by a lot of things. One of my favourite teachers at Pratt, Lenny Bacich, once said to me, ‘The world is change; the only constant is the way in which you adapt yourself to it.’ It really made an impression on me and it’s something I think about all the time. What resonated was this idea of ‘inspiration being all around us’ and our ability to understand what we look at, how we interpret what we see, and how we put it back out into the world for others to have a think about. That’s important to me and is the driving force of who I am as a creative person. I love finding new perspectives but this one has always stuck with me. 

I also love technology, anime, comic books - I always wanted to be an artist so I still read comics - art, music, and anything that connects to my sensories… I love hearing something that makes the hair on my arm stand up because it feels so good when you hear it. I love a good cry in a movie. I love the emotion that something can bring out in you. What has drawn me to art, design and creativity is that it's such a phenomenal thing to be able to create something that moves somebody else - whether that’s through a painting, a piece of music, a piece of film or writing. 

I am grateful every day that I have something inside of me that enables me to, hopefully, do that for another person. It's a very special thing that I don't take lightly. I try not to take it for granted. I'm inspired by other people who can do that. 

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