Humanaut: If Darwin Reinvented the Creative Process

I’ve been interim Managing Director at Humanaut during a pivotal year for this small but innovative ‘ad agency’.

Humanaut had already long eschewed retainer clients, big city complications and a traditional agency overhead structure. But this year we put the learnings of years of experiments into an entirely new method of concepting and making what was once adorably called ‘advertising’.

Along with helping to put financial controls and management structure in place, I helped the founders define their beliefs into a Humanaut Methodology that relies on a somewhat radical premise in the industry:

Intuition guides the creative process;
Live consumer testing guides the path forward.

The methodology, which permeates every action taken within the organization is based on two basic features.

First, we developed our live testing environment and process lovingly called the Hopper — a way to test creative concepts with consumers during ideation, giving clients the confidence that their work will be on-message and perform well before shipping.

Second we built an on-site 4,000 sq ft production facility with three full-service editing bays, a recording studio and a 16 ft tall by 40 ft wide seamless cyclorama wall. This allows us to make prototypes for the Hopper quickly and seamlessly: the same folks who make rough test videos make the beautiful finished product.

Fully embracing testing and production has changed everything about Humanaut’s business. Junior creatives are now Content Creators fluent in design, animation and video. Art Directors are also set designers. Instead of account executives our clients interact with Creative Producers responsible for seeing through a project from start to ship.

And the proof is in the organic, free-range, stevia-sweetened pudding:

- Revenue, profit and staff are all at record levels
- Over half of our production was done in house this year
- More than 3/4 of our post-production was done in house this year
- Just about half of our business is repeat

And we were named no. 10 on AdAge’s 2020 A-List.

The Humanaut mission, which is reflected over six years of choosing only to work with brands that make the world a better place.

Humanaut’s on-site 4,000 sq ft production facility and a 16 ft tall by 40 ft wide seamless cyclorama wall.

The team discusses the next project at the ping-pong table.

The Humanaut Method: you can steal it but you’ll never execute it without that Chattanooga magic.