Ben Ostrower: Selling Social Impact and Living Your Values (In Your Work)
Ben Ostrower brings a splash of color to political and progressive causes. Images: c/o Wide Eye
There is an ongoing debate in the creative world: Is it important to share your client’s values to work with them? For Ben Ostrower, the Founder and Executive Creative Director of Washington, D.C.-headquartered Wide Eye, the answer is an emphatic yes. The 30-person creative agency got its start partially in Democratic politics – its earliest clients alumni from the 2008 Obama campaign, countless Gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and, most recently, creating the brand and website for the Biden-Harris White House.
While politics is where Wide Eye began, it has expanded its reach to social impact causes and organizations, working with organizations engaged in a range of causes, including health justice, climate justice, reproductive rights, criminal justice reform, and pro-democracy initiatives to name just a few. Their core belief is that causes and nonprofits can, and should, have branding and quality design on par with the most notable brands in the world. And they’ve succeeded in that effort.
Here, Ostrower shares how he came to start Wide Eye, the secret sauce that allows them to work with organizations that have clear and sometimes conflicting elements of their mission, and the tradeoffs of aligning your personal values with your professional work.
The Wide Eye Team at work and play.
Why start Wide Eye?
It was accidental. I started my career in filmmaking and had every intention of being a famous, Oscar-winning director someday. Right out of college, I developed a passion for documentary filmmaking and for seven years worked with a team of filmmakers producing mostly historical documentaries in the vein of Ken Burns. It was a crash course in American cultural and political history and running a small creative business. But while I enjoyed making documentaries, I realized I just didn’t have the deep well of patience for the years and years of work required to produce a single story. But more importantly, I had a deep interest not just in visual storytelling, but also design, technology, photography, typography and color, and social impact – all these different mediums and disciplines – and those itches ultimately needed scratching. Digital creative was a much better home for those passions and, frankly, that impatience.
At the same time, ever since high school in the mid 1990s, in the early days of the internet, I had been building websites and designing brands–essentially a self-taught digital designer. I reached the point where I knew I wanted to be a visual storyteller and do meaningful work that had a social impact or educational component to it. So I leaned into digital design as a side-hustle. Everyone needed a website at this time–the mid 2000s before most of social media–and the timing coincided with the Barack Obama candidacy for president in 2008, which for me was a lightning bolt moment. An intersection of American storytelling, design, technology, branding, and social impact.
How did you break through and get your first consulting job in politics?
I grew up in a super political family where you talked (yelled) politics at the dinner table and I became passionate about supporting Obama in 2008 (at the time as just a volunteer). I made it my business to get to know some of the folks who worked on the campaign after the election in 2009.
Through a series of connections, I got connected with a consultant working for Steve Benjamin, a candidate running for mayor of Columbia, South Carolina at the time. He needed a website and visual identity, and I did that job – treated it, naively, like an opportunity to design something on par with Obama’s campaign. The project went well, Steve won, and that led to more work – a Governor’s race and a Senate race in the next political cycle in 2010. I was able to connect with a lot of people very quickly because everyone in politics is bouncing between these campaigns every two years. And everyone in politics is always looking for cheaper and faster, and I was very willing to do that at the time.
My bread and butter became working on these campaigns and raising the bar for what the user and brand experience would look like for Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns. It became successful enough that I could hire people full time – or at least I needed to in order to keep up with the demand.
Wide Eye’s work on the Stacey Abrams campaign.
Wide Eye takes a stand with its client work.
Music Will, a Wide Eye client, is a music education nonprofit that brings meaningful music programs to kids across all the United States.
You mentioned the cyclical and often unpredictable nature of political work. How have you evolved Wide Eye from a single focus on political campaigns to social impact organizations?
Over the last 15 years, Wide Eye sort of came of age with the people who work in a larger progressive ecosystem – individuals that have devoted their careers to nonprofits, campaigns, and causes. Folks might leave a political campaign and go work for a place that has a policy focus, issue focus, or a place like the ACLU. As they bounced around they shared our name, because we were passionate, reliable, and good at what we do.
We now have 30 people and are growing, and are larger than I ever expected. Investment in creative and digital communications obviously has only grown and the budgets have gotten bigger. The folks we grew with have now graduated into positions of authority and control purse strings. We’ve invested in those relationships for years. And we continue to jump at the chance to work with people who are trying to sell a bigger idea, to drive a mission, to build a community, and to fundraise for a specific mission. That type of social impact is not always an easy thing to sell and explain, but we relish tricky work like that.
What about your skill set lends itself to ideas-driven organizations?
It goes back to being self-taught. Whenever I sat down with a blank screen to design a new logo or a website, I had to intuitively navigate my way through to the core idea, purpose, and the emotional through line. If I couldn’t figure that out, I needed to work with the client to try and understand the big picture – and a lot of the time that involved parsing a client’s beliefs and vision. So, I sort of naturally started doing brand strategy, without even knowing what it was called. And now all these years later we’re leaning into that more with our clients, so we can work with them starting on day one, rather than just when they need a website. We want to sit down with them and work to shape the story they want to tell and to better articulate their vision and values. The rest follows that story. The earlier we can get into their internal process, the better the work we can do. We’ve moved beyond digital and production to more strategic storytelling work.
What is Wide Eye’s secret sauce?
We are good at working with complex organizations that sometimes have conflicting elements of their mission or competing audiences. As an example: “We need to save democracy, but we also need to appeal to conservative audiences.” We take these nuanced, potentially fraught, dynamic stories and distill them down to a clear purpose and identity that feels authentic, and then gets infused into the creation of incredibly well-crafted digital creative assets. There’s truth and tension behind every brand. And our job is to find it.
We also never compromise on the quality of the work. We have very strong craft and quality to our design work – and it’s deeply connected to the story our client is telling. Design is a substantial part of being able to inspire people, win hearts and minds, and advance causes. Why shouldn't social impact organizations have design as sophisticated and thoughtful as Nike? We design with clear intention.
In a lot of ways, how we tell stories visually relates back to my filmmaking days where you bring people on a journey that connects emotionally and feels authentic; stories need heroes and villains, driving action, obstacles, and triumphs.
You’ve written about how values matter and it feels like in the work that you do, you can't not put your own values into client work. How do you view putting your own values in client work?
For me the watershed moment when I decided to devote myself more to social impact was in my 20’s when George W. Bush was president with 9/11, the Iraq War, and Columbine; events that made it feel like the America that we were promised was not what we were getting. And that democracy is fragile and requires a lot of work, and that a more just, equitable, less violent society was worth fighting for. I felt almost obligated to devote my career to something I could put those values in.
Growing the Wide Eye team, we’ve found in recent years that more and more people follow their values in terms of deciding where they want to work. Everyone on our team feels they can sleep well at night because they're working on a project that is devoted to a bigger mission: criminal justice reform or reproductive rights, or any number of other social issues.
People, more than ever, also spend based on their values now. That’s the biggest shift we've benefited from as we’ve come of age and taken on larger and larger brand challenges. More and more Americans put their dollars, at least partially, towards products and companies that align with their worldview and values.
The Wide Eye team has grown to a team 30 people strong.
What happens if a client whose values don’t align with Wide Eye’s wants to work with you. How do you evaluate it creatively and as a business owner responsible for 30 team members?
That’s the thing everyone wants to know: If a MAGA Republican or, let’s say, a company that pedals misinformation showed up with a truckload of money would you work for them? The answer is absolutely no because, at least pragmatically, it would alienate our existing clients and our team. I'm not going to name names, but we've been contacted by companies that, if we worked with them, I would have to respond to concerns and protests from my staff. And that's part of the currency of running a company like this is – I have to be accountable to them and protect that culture. We have to live our values, too.
That said, I’ve had to become a more and more nimble business owner over the years, so there has had to be some elasticity in terms of what defines a perfect client fit for us. If a company comes to us and their values are completely misaligned, then it’s an easy no. But there can be a lot of nuance here and you have to be thoughtful. My view is that it is worth it to speak with a wide range of potential clients to listen to what they have to say. Maybe I can learn something, or there is something I missed or misunderstand. Or something they’re doing can lead to a constructive conversation. Close-mindedness on the progressive side drives me nuts, and at least personally I do my darndest to try to not embody that. It’s always worth questioning your own values and deeply held beliefs. So, as much as we’re a values-driven company with a point of view, we also try not to be dogmatic. It’s a tricky balance.
Who is a dream client that you would love to work with?
LEGO with its corporate social responsibility arm, values, and educational focus. I’ve been a big LEGO nerd as a child and now as a dad. That would be incredible.
Or, hell, Nike or Patagonia would be a dream.
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