The End of Creative Convention
As startup culture impacts the industrial landscape, today’s top talents are breaking with convention and finding inspiration and creative freedom in the most unexpected of places — luxury real estate.
Convention: kənˈven(t)SH(ə)n | noun | an established technique, practice, or device
Creativity has always been a driving force in the workplace, but it could be argued that today’s startup culture is unlocking its full potential.
For decades, a rigid structure has existed. Creatives worked within the confines of their designated field, and the exposure to their company’s bigger picture was controlled and fleeting. And among the “non-creative” fields — finance, healthcare, automotive, insurance, and real estate — these visual and verbal communicators circulated in and out, delivering in prescriptive bursts.
As the world acclimates to more fluid career paths, more collaborative workflow, and more technology-driven efficiencies, we now have ample opportunity to not only churn out new products, but to conceptualize how design and content inform that process. At this frontier is a new breed of company perfectly positioned to adopt — and primed to support — this wave of creative output. These innovators weave thoughtfully crafted words and images into their corporate fabric, foster relationships across departments, and allow creatives infinite options to stretch professionally and test the bounds of what’s possible.
While great talents still work in the advertising agencies, design firms, publishing houses, and film studios of the world, those most eager to challenge creative constraints are increasingly finding a place within this entrepreneurial ecosystem, in environments where they can sate their deeper thirst for impactful creation.
This was my vision for joining Compass from day one — to build a marketing group with top in-house creative and production capabilities at its core and to construct a home for boundary-pushing makers from a variety of backgrounds.
Looking back at 2015, we have come a long way toward realizing this goal of a world-class studio. Our design and marketing team members hail from a cross-section of industries — film, publishing, advertising, architecture, photography, music, beauty, and their own design shops. And yet, they’ve found their way to a technology-based real estate startup. Why?
Startups are inherently creative environments.
From Betterment to Oscar to Uber, new ventures arise from the belief that ‘new’ can, in fact, be better. These pioneers are entrepreneurial and confident, yes, but they’re also iterative and open-minded. Their industries weren’t traditionally attractive to great creative talent, but each of these companies has built their business atop beautiful design work, dynamic communications, original content, and internal teams from a cross-section of industries, viewing its people and their Big Ideas as an essential competitive advantage.
Similarly, at Compass, when the marketing team pitches a brand magazine or a video series to the company’s executives or agents, they aren’t just receptive; they’re enthusiastic.
We’re already in the business of pioneering new ideas, so experimenting with different mediums and messaging is entirely aligned with our company’s DNA.
Real estate was never an industry known to champion this thinking, but when designers, producers, strategists, and editors join our team, they align not with the industry’s vision, but with their chance to make their mark upon it.
Technology is fundamentally a design form.
Engineers and product developers may be among the most widely discounted creative population working today. While their preferred medium consists of code, whiteboard, and wireframes, the process of developing a digital tool is akin to laying out an ad, penning an article, or shooting video footage — from ideation to going live, from crafting a user experience to deftly incorporating their feedback, every step is iterative and design-intensive.
The only difference is that theirs is an existential creativity, whereas the field has traditionally revolved around more tangible, aesthetic concepts. The truest evidence of this field’s imaginative aptitude? Because each decision is made in pursuit of innovation or improvement, it is virtually impossible for a successful technology company to ferment or stagnate.
The best need new challenges.
Approaching an unorthodox field as a creative contributor inherently allows for greater impact. Not only are you able to influence your firm, but often you have the unique ability to shape the interface of an entire industry.
Rather than respond to pre-existing tenets, you’re able to reinvent image, experience, and process as you go.
You’ve heard the stories before: the designer who toils in an ad agency working on a single account for years or cranking out identical banner ads for different clients. On a lean, innovative team, no contributor is less than pivotal. I have found the best modern design talent to be skilled across multiple mediums — layout, typography, animation, photography, art direction, illustration — and because of this unique aptitude, they are even more allergic to limitation.
Our department concepts, styles, and directs shoots, animates films, produces a magazine, creates advertisements, composes soundtracks, designs brand collateral, develops original social media content, and produces it all from concept to distribution — a diversity of exposure that certainly no other real estate marketing team can claim, and few roles in the creative industry afford. And not only do we perform these functions; we’re constantly innovating better methodology, from social media image generators to signage template systems.
And what about those who spend 80% of their time on internal output, like writing Keynote pitch decks or designing a video just to convince a client to let them do the work? By eliminating these steps, the effort is concentrated on better solutions — solutions our agents and their clients can actually experience. The in-house environment we foster attracts the talent necessary and frees them to strive for a constantly improving ratio of high quality, faster speed, and lower cost.
Ultimately, the term ‘creative’ can be misleading. Ideas aren’t insurable and even the most dynamic environments can become stale — especially when accepted practices become routine and stimulation is lacking. But startup environments will always be creative, because every process is an experiment, and the potential of each idea is limitless. As we bend the rules and adapt its principles, we recognize that creativity does not exist in a vacuum; it has a place within even the most improbable of environments — and may indeed thrive more for it.
If you’re looking to join a collaborative team and impact an entire industry — say hi.
Head of Design and Marketing Matt Spangler joined Compass in 2014 after three years of building an in-house creative studio at Tribeca Enterprises, where he oversaw the Tribeca Film Festival branding, responsive sites, new ticketing platforms, documentary films and TV series fully funded by brands, YouTube channels, national advertising campaigns, and digital product development for the Tribeca Shortlist SVOD platform.
