BEN JAMES [Relentless Reinvention]

🪩 Welcome to the DISCO - Volume 1: Issue 2. 🪩

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For this issue, I continued my series of check-ins with veteran creative leader Ben James, Crispin's new Chief Creative Officer, on the last day of his first 30 days in the role.

Prior to taking on the new CCO position at Crispin, Ben was the Chief Innovation Officer at GALE, and before that held roles as the Head of Creative for the New York Times' T Brand Studio, and Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director of Creative Innovation at JWT New York.

In this conversation, recorded on the literal last day of his first month in the role, we discussed areas such as the printed-screenshot ritual he implemented to help connect with his team, why he's betting that "come by and see us" beats any polished pitch deck as a new-business strategy, and why he believes "relentless reinvention is a feature, not a bug".

For the full DISCO experience, check out the complete conversations for Volume 1 wherever you get your podcasts, or at PopRockDisco.com.

As a final note before you dive in, this project grew out of a deep love for the (human) creative experience. If POP ROCK DISCO is your vibe, I’d be honored if you shared it with other humans in your world to help keep it going. Happy forwarding. ; ) 🪩 

— Vince

A particular kind of question follows a place like Crispin, and Ben James has clearly heard it in one form or another for years.

It comes from alumni who left and moved on to other things, from clients trying to get a read on where the agency stands now, and from competitors doing the usual industry gossip about who's still standing and who's changed. Whatever the source, it always comes down to the same question: what's actually going on over there?

Most agencies would answer that question with a press release, or a case study, or a well-produced deck walking you through the current thinking.

Ben, however, has decided the answer is simpler than any of that.

It's a strategy that only works if there's something worth walking into, and this is where the physical space of the Crispin offices starts to come into focus. Crispin's NYC office setup isn't built like a traditional agency floor; in Ben's own words, it's closer to a live media operation.

His comparison is an interesting way to say a physical environment can be designed so a message moves from idea to output as quickly as the internet does, rather than at the speed a typical creative process is built for.

And it means that when someone does take him up on the invitation, there's an actual working agency to show them, not a polished deck or sizzle reel of past work.

The social newsroom, the packaging work, and the client projects in progress are all happening day to day, and Crispin’s invitation is simply to come and experience it from the inside instead of hearing about it secondhand.

Even the smallest version of the invitation carries that same tone. Ben mentioned it can start as casually as an old friend reaching out to say they're in town, and his answer is the same every time: come by and see us.

To me, it feels less like a tactic and more like a genuine standing offer to those truly interested, and at thirty days into the process, it seems to be working, with clients and partners continuing to take him up on it.

Listen to the full podcast episode:

When I connected with Ben on the literal last day of his first month as Chief Creative Officer of Crispin, there was something fitting about speaking with him in that exact window; thirty days being just enough time to have formed a real opinion about a company, but not nearly enough time to have settled into it fully.

When I asked what the first month had actually looked like from the inside, broadly speaking, he described something closer to an apprenticeship than a checklist of “wins”: a deliberate slowing down to understand the people and the work before trying to shape either one.

What's interesting is that his first real move toward that kind of learning wasn't a listening tour or a string of one-on-ones designed to check a box.

It was something much different, and in its own way, much more revealing about how Ben thinks: he launched an internal exercise called Chop-Up-the-Algorithm, and the whole premise hinged on making something that's usually frictionless - sharing a link - deliberately more manual.

No links dropped into a Teams chat. No forwarded posts. Just printed screenshots, physically carried into a room for collective exploration. It became a standing appointment almost immediately, and it's been held for weeks now across multiple offices.

However, Ben wasn't fully confident anyone would actually show up, either, and he'd braced himself for the eye-rolls before he'd even sent the invitation.

What happened instead was the kind of thing you can't really engineer; people who weren't even specifically invited to the early sessions started noticing it happening and asking to be let in.

But the moment that tells you the most about how this took root is smaller and more nuanced. One day, in Ben’s third week into the job, someone showed up on the wrong day entirely - a Tuesday, printed screenshots in hand - and found the space empty.

Throughout his first month, what began as Ben’s fastest way to understand thirty+ people across multiple cities has quietly become something more durable: an archive, growing one Thursday at a time, that's changing how the agency studies its own industry.

There's a second effect here that he didn't originally set out to create, and it might end up being the more important one. When a team shares the same links back and forth, their feeds tend to drift toward each other over time. Everyone slowly ends up fed the same algorithmic diet, mistaking convergence for alignment. This new ritual has done the opposite.

And it's already outgrowing the room it started in. Outside collaborators have caught glimpses of the sessions and asked to come back, and Ben is now shaping a version of it for Crispin’s own clients.

By the end of our one-month milestone check-in, Ben talked about what the exercise had actually been training the team to do all along, and it wasn't really about algorithms at all.

In the end, a newly implemented team ritual, built to help a new leader learn about his people, has quickly become a new way Crispin thinks about media itself: one printed screenshot at a time.

Listen to the full podcast episode:

Toward the end of our conversation, after Ben had walked us through a month's worth of rituals and strategies and physical spaces designed with real intention, he mentioned something that felt different, like a governing belief more than anything else; as if it was underneath everything else he talked about up to that point.

It's interesting to hear this from a veteran leader a month into a new role, because most leaders in new positions are still trying to build stability. But Ben seems to be doing the opposite, and he explains why that's less contradictory than it sounds.

Earlier in the conversation, almost as an aside, he'd mentioned an old thought experiment he'd found himself returning to that weekend.

With that insight in mind, the metaphor reframes reinvention as continuity rather than instability. The boat - whether the media industry or Crispin itself - is still the boat, even after every plank has been replaced, because what's actually being preserved isn't the material, but the intent behind it.

Ben thinks Crispin's business works in the same way, and that the only thing that has to stay unchanged- the ability to stay ready for change- is what the agency is actually chasing.

He also drew a distinction to explain why reinvention doesn't feel like chaos to him. He's thought a lot, he said, about the difference between making something beautiful and making something that actually works for a business.

The idea that their work is commercial art, not high art, keeps the reinvention disciplined instead of scattered. The craft matters, of course, but it's always in service of a specific moment for a specific client business, not in service of the work existing on its own terms. And as it turns out, that’s exactly the mindset a shrinking budget demands.

Ben described the same philosophy already being tested in real terms, as Crispin looks ahead to leaner client scopes.

Thirty days in, the throughline underneath every team ritual and strategy Ben talked about wasn’t a fixed plan for what Crispin will look like next, but a fixed belief about what it means to keep changing on purpose in 2026.

See ya next time.

-Vince 🪩