BEN JAMES [The First 30]

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

For our inaugural issue, I'm bringing together a series of three separate real-time conversations I recorded with veteran creative leader Ben James, Crispin's new Chief Creative Officer, across his first month in the role - one at the two-week mark, one at three weeks, and the last one on his final Friday of his first month 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.

At the core of this 3-part series, evolving across all three conversations, a single thread - a new team ritual he calls "Chop Up the Algorithm" - evolved from a newly implemented Thursday exercise for teambuilding into an immersive, strategic experience that industry-leading clients and partners now ask to sit in on a regular basis. And we documented it all.

Watching this type of process, culture, and strategy take shape in real time, week to week, is the kind of experience you usually only have access to if you're in the room while it's happening, not after it's polished and packaged as a case study or talking points. It was exactly the type of experience that Pop Rock Disco was built for, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

A deep and sincere thank you to Ben James, Maggie Malek, Maggie Garrison, and the rest of the wonderful Crispin team for letting us into their world and trusting us with their story.

For the full DISCO experience, check out our YouTube channel for more highlights from Volume 1 + listen to the complete conversations wherever you get your podcasts, or at PopRockDisco.com for Issue 1.1, Issue 1.2, and Issue 1.3.

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

Ben James is the son of an architect. “My dad was an architect, my mom was in office management,” he told me. “My stepmom was in counseling.” From all three, he says, he learned things most CCOs never talk about: how to design a space a community can actually use; what happens to people when they come together in a room; what the human condition looks like up close. “I've told these stories my whole life,” he said.

Thirty days into his tenure as Chief Creative Officer at Crispin, and 30 days into our time together documenting his journey, a seemingly casual anecdote brought it all together.

Ben was mid-story with a colleague about a water bottle he'd turned into a vase - a keepsake from a visit to the Truth Initiative's offices years earlier - when B Lalanne, Crispin's VP of Data and Technology, stopped him.

“Can I approach you with an observation and make room for that?” she asked. He told her yes, of course. “You see stories in everything,” she said. “You see things and (you see) what's happening in the world. You see stories in everything.”

There’s an interesting thing about documenting someone's first month in a new role in real time: you get to watch them find the sentence for what they've been doing all along.

Where most leaders might come in with a pre-planned strategy deck or team mandate, Ben started with listening. “Twenty-five one-on-ones in two weeks, split between the New York office in the World Trade Center, the creative, design, and creator team in Houston, and teams in Los Angeles, Colorado, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.”

“I've now had twenty-five one-on-one meetings in two weeks,” he told me, describing conversations he'd originally designed to feel casual, but that people kept showing up to with real weight: their dreams, their ideas, their obstacles.

Out of those conversations came two rituals almost immediately: Wednesday Wall Reviews, and a Thursday practice he called Chop-Up-the-Algorithm. The instructions for these group exercises were almost defiantly simple: Screen-grab whatever inspires you from your social feeds, print it out, and bring it in.

No forwarded links, no shared Slack threads, just a discussion about why it made them pause and pay attention.

His inspiration for this approach goes back decades, when he was an Art Director manually cutting boards for the (then) Crispin Porter + Bogusky Burger King pitch with an X-Acto knife. Twenty-plus years later, he brought the same tactile logic back to his new team.

Interestingly, the reasoning for jumping into this type of exercise from the beginning was more about space and time than screens and scrolling. “I think a creative culture needs a physical space for people to connect,” he said - which is also why the New York office now has a room he calls “Right Brain”, and one next door called “Left Brain” (more on this below), and why a cork board that came with the original office space is now being thoughtfully designed, day to day, week to week, with the personal interests and work of the people who actually work at Crispin.

But for Ben, representation in the design goes far beyond the internal Crispin community. A maker named Makayla Sheehan made an alphabet entirely out of breakfast foods. It’s on the wall. Ben’s friend and local barista, Ju Lee (insta: praything_art), created a painting that Ben noticed and complimented after Ben mentioned he was taking a new job. Ju came back a week and a half later with a piece made specifically for the office. Ben offered to pay him for it.

“I want nothing monetary,” his barista told him. “I don't want there to be that kind of an exchange... I'm just inspired to hear about what y'all are doing.” The painting now hangs in Crispin’s Manhattan office.

There’s also a personal version of this visual-based, moment-of-pause ritual. Ben has kept a regular mind-mapping practice since he learned it as an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and for the first time, he's started to share it with his whole team.

As a weekly practice, he told me about how he draws his reflections on Saturday mornings between five and seven a.m., then sends them to the entire team in a Monday note. When Crispin CEO Maggie Malek first called him about the role, he sat down that weekend and “drew the feeling” before he wrote the plan, he said; a sketch he later printed and hung beside Makayla's breakfast alphabet and a text message from his uncle in Dallas when he found out about Ben’s move back to Crispin. His uncle's reaction: “Full circle to greatness.”

By the end of our check-in, week two of Ben’s new Crispin journey was officially on the books, and our first of three Friday conversations throughout his first month had come to a close.

Click here to listen to the full podcast conversation for Volume 1 Issue 1.1.

By week three, Chop-Up-the-Algorithm had traveled to Crispin’s Houston office, and it changed shape the moment it did.

“They brought zines. They brought package design. They brought sticker books,” Ben said, describing what the design-focused Houston teams showed up with once he told them nothing was required except whatever inspired them. But what surprised him most weren’t the inspirations themselves, but what the exercise produced inside the office: a strategist and someone on the media team, who'd apparently never really talked, found themselves deep in a conversation about geolocation strategy they'd never had before. In week 3, it was already working; ritual influencing culture, culture influencing the work.

This was also the week Ben got explicit about the belief underneath it all. “We are doing this as a commercial art. It is an art, but commerce is in the front of what we're intending to do,’ he said; a distinction he traces straight back to Crispin's own history.

As our conversation continued, Ben’s thoughts turned to impact, and how Crispin's most famous campaign is remembered wrong. He said Crispin invented the Truth anti-smoking brand in the late '90s after Florida's Department of Health came looking for a way to reach kids. Their insight, as Ben tells it, was that “we understand from what's been unearthed from legal documents that kids are being manipulated by marketing.”

“The magic of the Truth brand wasn't that we did amazing ads,” Ben said. “The magic of the Truth brand is it saved the lives of children.” The water bottle from his visit to Truth's offices years before was already starting its second life on his new desk, on its way to becoming a new vase and focal point in the Crispin office.

For me, this was also the first conversation in our series where Ben’s attention and dedication to the office's physical space came into focus. He described a room-in-progress he called the right brain living room: “We are going to invite clients to come sit with us in the left brain living room, and we're going to create a vision of the algorithm for them that matters to them on this wall.”

As the halfway point of our 3-part check-in series neared its end, I also heard the crown jewel of his big-picture strategy for the first time. Ben said that when friends, clients, and the rest of the industry ask what's going on at Crispin, his answer was simple: “When people ask us that, we are going to say, ‘come by and see’.”

By the end of our check-in, week three of Ben’s new Crispin journey was officially on the books, and our second of three Friday conversations throughout his first month had come to a close.

Click here to listen to the full podcast conversation for Volume 1 Issue 1.2.

🪩 Make sure to check out Ben’s upcoming feature issue + podcast episode dropping Oct. 1st, where we go deep into Crispin’s new “Come by and See Us” strategy, Chop-Up-the-Algorithm, and much, much more.

Three days before his official one-month mark as Crispin’s new Chief Creative Officer, what started as a way for Ben to meet and connect with his new team had become more like infrastructure than an icebreaker.

“The insights are flowing into work. We're finding that when we put five people into a space with each other, and they've each printed something that inspires them or maybe some dominant theme in what they're seeing in their feeds, everybody's experiencing something different,” he said. According to Ben, visitors even started asking if they could sit in on the sessions. Clients started asking for the same thing, which is no small signal with a client list like theirs.

“There is an amazing group of clients that are part of the Crispin experience right now - DSW, Samsung, Ken's Foods, which makes Sticky Fingers Smokehouse barbecue sauce, New Balance, American Eagle.”

Some of his client research also doubled as family life in this first month: “We're getting ready for a meeting with DSW, and I took my family shopping at DSW, and I took like two hundred photos.”

One client, unprompted, put words to what that kind of closeness to a brand produces: “You are an extension of our team,” they told Ben. “Never get discouraged about us saying no to something, because every time you bring something progressive, it pushes us to think about how we could make these kinds of things possible.”

"Come by and see" - Ben's strategic answer to anyone asking what's actually going on at Crispin - was also starting to come with real-world logistics by the end of the month: which doors clients walk through, where their coats are hung up, what someone sees the moment they walk in.

By the end of this first month, he had also written something very specific down and shared it with the whole team. The sentiment behind it was clear: “If an experience for us in the past is going to be good for us in the market today, we're going to use that experience in the market. But if an experience for us in the past is holding us back...we need to let it go, and we need to move on. And people have embraced that.”

So he wrote it plainly to the team: “Relentless reinvention is a feature, not a bug.”

As we wrapped up our final conversation in our check-in series, three days before his official one-month mark, I noticed that Ben's thoughts on the job ahead of him hadn’t actually changed much from our initial talk: “Get to know the people, get to know the clients, affect the work. Not come in with all the answers when so much is going well, but come in with the ability, through listening sessions, to really listen (and find) where in the system itself we could make adjustments.”

By the end, though, it finally clicked for me: “I didn't even realize that this whole thing is part of how you approach the work and your process personally,” I told him.

What had sounded, week to week, like a list of separate initiatives that he was working to pull together was never separate at all. It was one thread, one approach; the one B Lalanne had named out loud in his first week, and it was guiding everything he was doing the whole time.

In the end, he brought it all together for us as we concluded the series:

"I mean, look, Crispin has always been a platform for inventiveness. In a modern frame, we do it in creative media, newsroom social, and package design forms... but it’s always been a place to connect dots, make waves, and help clients sell stuff. It's a unique opportunity we have ahead of us."

🪩 Post-Recording Update: As of this week, Chop-Up-the-Algorithm expands to Los Angeles. Progress continues. ; )

Click here to listen to the full podcast conversation for Volume 1 Issue 1.3.

There's a difference between telling someone the story of your first month in a new role once it's over and talking about it in real time while you're still in it. Ben named what that difference usually does to a story.

“…you're looking for the raw…actual thing,” he said to me about our approach to the series, near the end of our final conversation. In traditional PR and media, “Everything has to be manicured down to the corporate sentence…and I learn by articulation,” he said.

For me, that’s the whole bet with my approach to POP ROCK DISCO. A retrospective interview gets the polished version, the PR talking points, arrived at after the fact, with the rough edges already sanded off.

Real-time access to those doing the work while it’s happening captures the truth of the moment, which also means it captures the moment someone is still figuring out what's true.

See ya next time.

-Vince 🪩