From job descriptions to departments, creativity is a label commonly used in the advertising industry. But at Big Spaceship, things are done differently. As founder & CEO Michael Lebowitz explains, “We’re the only agency that I know of in the world that has no creative directors.” You won’t see the word creativity in any other employee’s title either. Using creativity in a title is a common practice that Lebowitz describes as “one of the most awful things about the industry.” Big Spaceship dismisses this idea of labeling a single group of people “the creatives,” since everyone in the agency “participates in creativity.”
So with creativity as a baseline quality, what is a core characteristic that employees need to possess? According to Lebowitz, it’s all about curiosity. “We look for people who want to be doing this kind of work, who think this work is really interesting,” he says. “People who want to explore and aren’t necessarily looking for stability and equilibrium as the defining factors for their job, but exploration and newness and discovery.”
Along with trading in equilibrium for excitement, Big Spaceship employees do not follow the typical vertical management structure. Instead the agency operates on a horizontal structure, with people working on an even playing field and figuring out how to solve problems together. You won’t find the typical divided departments. The open-format layout of the space reflects this feature. “One of the things that I really want is for people to think of the space itself and the company itself as a canvas, not as a structure,” says Lebowitz. “Sure there are some limitations to it. I define the edges of the canvas to some level and the rules of the palette … but really I want them to ‘make’ this place every day.”
Although Lebowitz admits to a huge amount of humor, joking and even sometimes practical jokes (often used intentionally to promote a certain workplace comfort level), he sums up the environment at Big Spaceship as “managed chaos,” a description best exemplified by knives and magnets. Read on:
“We have a magnetic knife rack in the kitchen and for many, many days someone [or maybe] many people were going in and creating patterns with the knives. And then somebody else was taking a cell phone picture of it every day, so it was [being] documented really organically. It got really elaborate and then the refrigerator poetry made its way in and then dangling spoons. I’ve got about thirty of these images and I show them pretty often to people. I think its one of the most important things that we’ve done, not because the output is important, but because of what it says about this place. All of these little moments in this little place are an opportunity for expression, of tinkering and toying and seeing what happens, everything we do is content.”
Although everybody participates in creativity at Big Spaceship, they do have a process beyond making sure that “a lot of types of minds” are surrounding things. Lebowitz emphasizes that the agency is rigorous in their research, auditing everything that may possibly be related both informationally and behaviorally, or as he says, by answering the question, “How can we figure out what people do and what they want?” Extensive research is just one of the many steps the agency takes to succeed, as their core idea of a failure is not trying hard enough. “If we try something and it doesn’t get the audience or response we want, that’s not a failure as long as we tried. If we pitch a business and we lose, the question isn’t ‘Why did we lose?’ it’s ‘Could we have done anything differently?’”
If it isn’t obvious by now, Big Spaceship is more than open to doing things differently, and they are always looking for new insight. As Lebowitz says best, “Nothing about this place is broken, but absolutely every aspect of it is open to being improved.”