What’s the most relevant business and/or creative lesson you learned in 2023 and how will you apply it to 2024?
In an extremely fragmented world where people are consuming content and experiences through nonlinear journeys, and where loyalty is fleeting, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult for brands to strike a chord with consumers. Digital connectivity has enabled people to become more dimensionalized, because they have more freedom to explore and express themselves in new channels and through new formats.
To resonate, you need to drill down deeper and activate your brand in an authentic way against a multitude of micro-communities. Speaking to your core audience – who loves you – will have an outsized impact on your brand.
AI will continue to be invaluable in pinpointing and understanding the real-time landscape. But, hold tight, humans – you’re not off the hook. When it comes to crafting narratives that ignite meaningful conversations, AI takes a back seat, and human creativity will still reign supreme. It’s a dance between the technological precision of AI and the creative finesse of human intervention that sets the stage for the future of brand engagement.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for 2024?
2024 will be the year where we see peak content creation and velocity will continue to be the key to unlocking connections for your brand on social media. To be successful, we will need to move faster than ever before and make more content than ever before. But content budgets, due to inflation, will continue to be flat. So, we will be forced to find new models and new ways of working and new narrative structures to connect with consumers.
Expect to see a shift away from celebrities and influencers and toward micro-influencers to activate your most passionate fans.
Does your company have plans for any major diversification and/or expansion/investment in technology and talent in 2024 and if so, what? How will this investment or diversification add value to what you can offer to clients? If instead you have already realized any actual expansion, made such an investment and/or diversified significantly recently and brought on new talent and expertise, share those developments with us along with what they mean to your staff and clients.
Much like any other company dedicated to experimenting and iterating, we’re testing AI uses across all disciplines. When used meaningfully, AI eliminates tasks that might normally take hours, which makes space for creativity and new thinking to thrive. Throughout that process, we’re being very mindful of brand IP and data security. It’s important that we demystify any uncertainty around AI and how, when and in what way, we can best use it. To support and inspire our crew on their journey to learn AI, we’ve already had rounds of prompt training, use case sharing, and knowledge sharing from AI industry experts. We’re fortunate that Big Spaceship operates as a community of experts that extends well beyond our client and clients.
Are you involved in virtual production or experimenting with AI, AR or other emerging disciplines or new technologies? Have you engaged in any real-world projects on these fronts? If so, relative to experimental and/or actual projects, briefly tell us about the work and what you’ve taken away from the experience. If the work is complete and you’d like to share a link to it, please include.
Currently, over 80% of Big Spaceship AI use is in our workflow and efficiency, with the remaining 20% focused on AI-enhanced creative. However, no purely AI-produced copy, visuals, or creative of any kind has been leveraged in consumer-facing work unless a concept specifically and transparently has required it. While AI is a valuable tool employed by our teams, it remains critical that human expertise guides how we prompt these tools and thoughtfully refines the output that they can give us.
We have leveraged Adobe’s suite of AI tools in our consumer-facing AI creative. Our primary use case to date consists of experimenting with basic tools like Photoshop’s generative fill to refine and increase the usefulness of owned image collections and reduce costs associated with stock photography needs. Teams have also been leveraging ChatGPT and Google Bard, including it early in our research and concepting process to spark ideas, iterate on copy, or quickly introduce entirely new avenues of thought. These specific and thoughtful use cases serve as small shortcuts in our concepting and writing process that, over time, result in a measurable increase in efficiency, and more time for our teams to focus on less tedious tasks.
Finally, Big Spaceship was responsible for the social launch of the Adobe Express AI update. Since that launch, we have not only used these proprietary AI tools in the creation of our content, but also educated Adobe users on how best to tap into these tools.
Gender pay disparity, sexual misconduct and the need for diversity & inclusion are issues that have started to be dealt with meaningfully. While the industry has made strides to address these issues, there’s still a long way to go. What policies do you have in place or plan to implement or step up in order to make progress on any or all of these fronts?
Big Spaceship invests in tools, processes, and behavioral awareness to increase the number of BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+, persons with disabilities, and members of other marginalized groups within our agency. This effort helps produce the best and most inclusive work for our clients by fueling an ecosystem that enables our crew to learn from one another and value diverse perspectives. We have maintained a remote-first workplace, increased our inclusive recruiting efforts, evolved our partnership with an external DE&I consultancy, offered additional tools and resources at no-cost to our crew, and implemented more transparent career frameworks and compensation structures.
We partner with The Adversity Group (TAG) to hold teams accountable to DE&I best practices and set KPIs around diversity measurement. In addition to facilitating agency-wide training and discussion around current events and offering crew a safe space to have diversity-related conversations, we leveraged TAG to help implement a self-ID survey this year. More in depth than the typical EEOC compliance survey, we sought to understand various gender types, races, pronouns, and religious beliefs.
Our ERGs – Big Gayship (LGBTQIA+), Color of Space (BIPOC), and Women in Space (Women identifying) – help keep our work relevant and culturally sound. Following traditional focus group formats with three members of each ERG, anonymous feedback is collected by a moderator. Feedback then gets incorporated into our creative solutions and the final product is shared back to ERGs to ensure they feel heard.
