DigitasLBi Boston welcomes our SVP of Experience Design — Brent Eveleth!
Get to know the new head of our Experience Design department at the DigitasLBi Boston office
The Boston XD team at DigitasLBi recently welcomed Brent Eveleth to our team as our new SVP. I sat down with Brent to hear more about his past, his plans and his advice for the young leaders in his charge. Eveleth is excited to be back in Boston, after several years in New York, and he’s excited to tap into the academic intellect and wide array of industries at our fingertips.
Changes in leadership are never easy. Even when going from one awesome leader to another (as we are), the transition itself can feel like a first day of school —a new teacher awaits you, who you depend on for your growth and well-being, and you just hope it works out.
1980s
BAR HARBOR, ME —The charm of the local, handmade souvenir shop is deceptively complex. The average tourist may just want a t-shirt that reminds them of that delicious lobster roll they had the day before, but how does one make an entire space capture that experience? If done right, it’ll be something that an average tourist doesn’t notice implicitly, but remembers emotionally, and in that memory, the connection to a brand experience is made.
Imagine for a moment a scruffy art and comic book-loving kid in a Bar Harbor souvenir shop window, arranging the latest summer display; something elegant and clever that will entice a new batch of tourists to come in and shop. He’s carefully composing some tchotchkes, some pillows or hats, maybe even some t-shirts he designed himself. For a few minutes in the morning, a young Brent Eveleth gets to mess around with creating an environment that gives folks a taste of Maine.
When I asked Brent where his love of retail & physical experience design came from, his eyes (and I think his beard too) lit up talking about how he started out designing the display windows for that local shop.
“It was a transformative thing at a fairly young age. It wasn’t just about handing cash over and getting a thing in return. It was about the way a space feels and how you move through it, and influencing if someone goes into this store or that store.”
So often, this is where it starts. In the gestation of a career in the arts & design, the younger years provide insight into the purest form of what we love to do. For Eveleth, it was no different. The shop had its own “brand” and look & feel, its own line of clothing and exclusive items. He also had the opportunity to do the floor layouts, to understand what it meant to have a customer move through a space and experience Maine in a different way, and come in to buy a piece of the beautiful state to bring back home. He gained understanding of how to use space as a means of connecting with an audience.
TODAY
The physical retail experience as of today is in serious flux. Paradoxically, customers seek authenticity and intimacy with brands, yet getting them into a branded physical space is becoming harder and harder to do. The tombstones of empty malls across our national retail cemetery are a grim reminder that investment in the apparatus of sales is as seductive as it is tenuous. How big a space do you really need? What do you want people to do in it? More importantly, what do people actually want to do in your store?
Eveleth sees our National Parks system as a great example from which to learn. “National Parks do this so well, through interactive, educational programs. Fundamentally, they must prepare people [in order] to understand what they’re seeing and why it’s important. The experience is more than just getting on the bus and looking out the window. NPS has created an entire apparatus around learning about the environment and teaching visitors to organically move through it, not just observe it from a distance.”
Just over 6 years ago, Eveleth left a big agency, and wasn’t sure if he’d ever go back to one. He was tired of the inflated processes, meetings about meetings, and work that was forgetting the customer. Looking back, he realizes it was a time when the empowerment he needed to effect change simply wasn’t there. Back then, he wasn’t as well-versed in how the production process can improve and aid the agency process. “It’s hard to affect that change from within. Unfortunately, it takes time and a certain career path to get to that place. At Digitas, I’m in a position to effect real procedural change. I’m hoping to teach our organization how every part of the customer journey is the ‘experience.’ XD’s playground is as big as we want it to be.”
When Eveleth says ‘Experience design’, he hopes its definition becomes broader and more inclusive than just software, apps and screens. His past work in XD and retail through brands such as Nike, Spotify, Sprint and American Express will bring that broader definition to our team’s work and ambitions, and will train our team on new ways to create experiences.
Brent’s beard enters the room about eight minutes before he does. Well, really it’s his beard, then his laugh, then him. I won’t lie, he looks intimidating, but in an inviting way, if that makes sense. Strangely, as intimidated as you might be, you’ll have a strong urge to shake his hand and say hello. And he welcomes it.
“XD’s playground is as big as we want it to be.”
During his transition from contributor to executive, one of the leaders Eveleth turned to for inspiration was Jason Fried, in his book “Rework”. It taught Eveleth how to manage from across the country, and how to facilitate collaboration with large teams rather than dictate a path forward from a distance.
Other lessons came harder. Years ago, after a promotion at Mullen, Eveleth learned the hard way to always go with your gut.
During the golden age of Flash, creating mini-games was a big deal. It was the go-to solution for anything that needed to be fancy and fun. For one of his first projects as the leader, the larger team had “led the witness” a bit on Flash mini-games being the perfect solution for the client. Eveleth’s alarm bells were going off that the path wasn’t right. “I continually felt like I was failing. I didn’t have the confidence that comes from experience to say it was wrong.”
One weekend, the alarm bells were deafening. He called his boss, John Wolfarth — “one of the best bosses I’ve ever had” — and they talked for two hours, hammering out a better solution, and a new direction was found. His boss assured him that despite the construct being less than perfect, the proper deliverable for the client could be found. But only in asking for help would Eveleth be able to deliver to the client at all.
The most challenging moments for a young leader are the ones that lack direction. The ones where you know the right solution exists, you know the right path is in front of you, but a fog of doubt and fear obscures it from view. According to Eveleth, a good leader must go through some period of doubt. A period of time in their career where the ground beneath them is not as solid as they’d like, where they have to make decisions and “just go with it.” Only after many phases like this will a healthy, confident leader emerge with a broader understanding and deeper scope of empathy and knowledge.
“It’s not fake it ’til you make it. It’s understanding what can or can’t be changed, and what you can work within, until you have the experience and capabilities to push further. It’s antithetical to what creatives consistently go after. What I learned was trying to do anything in a silo from the larger team is the surest path to failure. You need to have conversations across disciplines and across talents to bring the right solutions to the larger system.”
It’s a challenge to guide a team when you feel directionless, and perhaps that specter never fully goes away. For even the best leaders, the need to simply make a decision despite concerns is the sacrosanct daily action.
“You’ll never remove doubt or fear. All you can do is manage it. You can either harness it and work with it, or it can eat you up. It’s hard to manage or lead until you’ve wrestled with that yourself…Failure won’t kill you. Failure is a requirement in our work. You have to feel confident and comfortable at that edge failure, and then you can play at that edge all the time.”
The views expressed in this post are that of the authors and may not reflect the views of the agency or company.
