Michael Lebowitz founded Big Spaceship in 2000 and serves as its CEO. An architect and board member of SoDA, the Society of Digital Agencies, he is also a member of AIGA’s Visionary Design Council and the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.
Speaking on creativity, innovation and the evolution of digital communications, Michael participates in and leads seminars across the globe, from MIT’s Futures of Entertainment to the Click Conference to the One Club. He is also a frequent juror for creative awards and is serving as Chairman of both the 2009 One Show Interactive Jury and the D&AD Viral Jury.
The Digital Mindshare team really enjoyed putting this Spotlight together.
DM: What kind of agency is Big Spaceship?
ML: We call ourselves digital creative agency, but I think these descriptors are losing their meaning by overuse. Rather than describing our work in terms of a set of services or outputs, we describe it more in terms of the fact that we operate in the sphere where brands and consumers meet across the digital world. This is because in digital, new platforms and ways to reach consumers are being redefined all the time. Stating what an agency does with a strict definition of services – we do websites, or we do mobile, etc. – is to plan its obsolescence.
So instead, we reach consumers in the place where brands and consumers meet, whether on one platform or another.
DM: In order to find that constantly shifting place, you must really have to constantly research to stay on the cutting edge.
ML: We spend a lot of time looking at what is emerging; for example, look at the way websites are shifting. We need to be on top of how people are behaving in digital spaces and adapt to that very rapidly.
At Big Spaceship, we are organized into four core disciplines: strategy, production/project management, design, and technology. The heads of all four spend time thinking about how people are behaving in digital spaces. They look at what is going on in the world as it relates to their particular discipline and bring it back to share with the others.
We feel this is a real shift away from other agencies, many of which separate strategy and planning from the technological areas. We don’t do that. We also don’t assign a “leader.” All four disciplines work together end to end throughout a project. This allows for us to focus on fundamentally on our clients, and on what they want, desire and need.
We enable this concept by having all skills under one roof. We don’t outsource. In fact, we feel that having everyone internal is more essential in digital world than ever before: If you can’t build it, how can you plan for it?
DM: You are a member of an amazing group of people as a member of the AIGA Visionary Design Council. What is the function of this group?
ML: The council was put together by AIGA and Adobe a couple of years ago. They put together a group of professionals from different areas of design – education, branding, product design, etc. – to discuss what the designer of 2015 would look like, what skills they would need, what tools they would be using. They asked us to do research thinking into those questions, to produce a “near term” future.
DM: You are a prolific speaker, and much in demand. What are some of the FAQs you get when speaking?
ML: I talk about a lot of different things. What I cover depends on what is appropriate for the audience I am addressing at the time. For example, in AIGA talks, I discuss – and am questioned about – the internal structure of our agency, how we put the work together in our unique lateral organizational structure.
In other cases, I am questioned a bit more about where communication industry lies. People are interested in how we approach thinking about reaching people, especially now that things are literally upside down from the way we have been trying to reach people over the last 50 years.
People ask me about how best to reach people now, when attention is the most valued resource. My answer is that you have to give more than you expect in return.
DM: That’s an interesting concept – giving more than you expect in return. Can you go into more detail about that?
ML: There are so many factors in discussing this. There has been a lot of discussion about there being no more captive audience, that the consumer is in control…these phrases have been so often repeated that they have lost their meaning. Still, we have seen a complete flip-flop of scarcity and abundance. In the “old world” (pre-digital) there were 3-4 networks and attention on what was showing on those networks was abundant. What was lacking though was space for content. So before, attention was easy to come by; tens of millions watched and discussed the season finale of M*A*S*H, for example.
Today, you can create endless spaces of content to reach the consumer. Now, people’s attention is divided.
The playing field has been leveled! In the past, advertising had to compete with other advertising, nothing else. Now, as people spend more and more time online, advertisers have to compete with their entire lives. They hang out and have fun on Facebook, Hulu, etc. People’s personal space and lives will are – and will remain – much more valuable to them than an ad.
Here is what I say to advertisers: If you take a traditional advertising approach to the digital space, you can’t win; you are interrupting what they are enjoying. You can’t interrupt or compete head to head. How can you make a brand more relevant than ‘my friends’ or the content they want to consume? You can’t.
If you give more than you expect in return, you increase likelihood of engagement substantially. If you provide a valuable service, or valuable entertainment, people are more likely to take a few moments of cognitive surplus (Clay Shirky coined this term) and give it to you.
For example, we developed an iPhone app for Urban Daddy that is sponsored and paid for by Lexus. The campaign also has a website, and is called The Next Move. People are getting a lot out of this, spending time on the site and using the app…and Lexus is quietly sponsoring it. It’s a great campaign.
DM: What is the most interesting innovation you’ve developed?
ML: Lately, we have been doing mostly internal R&D projects. We actually do a lot of R&D work, and then put it out into the world to see what happens. In my experience, when you take the opportunity to do something like that, with no client constraints of budget or timeline, people can get the most inspired and great things get created.
We have been working on a Twitter aggregator called Qapture …it’s really like a content curation engine for Twitter. The insight behind it is that there is a strong incentive to keep following more and more people, but the problem is that the stream of tweets runs at a constant current, and the more that is in the stream the likelier you are to miss something that could be important to you. The application is being developed to “capture” the frames of key content providers, and organize them for the reader.
DM: What are three things you think brands in the digital space should be doing in the next 18 months?
ML: Brands need to make more tailored decisions on how they are spending their marketing dollars. Rather than having a governing rule on how much they spend on paid media versus other areas, they need to decide on more of a case-by-case basis. Sure, traditional media is still currently the best way to get the message out there, but all brands need to take a position on how they are going to exist on social spaces. They may decide they don’t want to be there, and they don’t have to be, but the conversation is going on whether they are there are not, so they at least need to be aware of what is going on in the space.
Also, they need to think about what they are going to be doing in the mobile space. The tipping point was reached with the launch of the iPhone – but it’s not just an iPhone thing. The entire “smart phone” revolution is changing what someone’s primary screen really is.
Finally, brands really need to get away from the more traditional media checklist thinking. Every new platform or population online is not just another “box to fill” on a media checklist; you can’t just find the place to put a message and put it there. People behave differently in different online communities; so plain old advertising is unlikely to make a significant impact. Display advertising is suffering, and likely not going to come back in its current format – it is old world messaging in a new world.
We are in a bespoke world now. Everything needs to be though out. One message doesn’t fit all, so this calls into question the traditional marketing assumption of a “single message that works everywhere.”
Brands need to ask: How do I build a system of elastic strategies that can tie together different types of audiences, but not necessarily force anything down their throats?