Ben James Returns to Crispin as Chief Creative Officer
Ben James rejoins Stagwell-owned Crispin as CCO after four years advising CEO Maggie Malek, replacing Kim Baskinger following her six-month run.
Updated
The brief
- Ben James joined Crispin as chief creative officer in August.
- James replaces Kim Baskinger, who spent about six months in the role.
- Crispin CEO Maggie Malek consulted James informally for four years before making the appointment official.
Ben James has returned to Crispin as chief creative officer, rejoining the Stagwell-owned agency where he began his career as an art director during its early-2000s heyday.
James joined in August. He replaces Kim Baskinger, who held the chief creative officer role for roughly six months.
The appointment grew out of a years-long working relationship between James and Crispin CEO Maggie Malek. For the past four years, Malek has turned to James whenever she had a question about the agency. Those conversations, she said, laid the groundwork for a formal role rather than a conventional hiring process.
"He was like, 'Why don't we just finally make it official?'" Malek said. "It came about really naturally and organically, and it's been fun because we speak each other's language."
James knows the agency from the inside. He worked at Crispin as an art director in the early 2000s, a period widely regarded as the shop's creative peak. That history gave Malek a trusted sounding board when she needed perspective on the agency's culture, work and identity — a resource she drew on repeatedly across her tenure as CEO.
The move gives Crispin a creative leader who already understands the institution he now runs. Malek's account of their four years of informal counsel suggests the CEO and CCO arrived at a shared view of the agency before James ever took the title.
The appointment also stabilizes a creative leadership seat that has turned over quickly. Baskinger's departure after about six months left the agency searching for continuity at the top of its creative department; James, with his prior history at the shop and his long-running dialogue with Malek, provides it.
For Stagwell, the hire installs a leader with both institutional memory and an established relationship with the agency's chief executive. Whether James can channel Crispin's early-2000s creative reputation into the agency's current work will define his tenure.
Based on Adweek
Filed under crispin, ben-james, creative-leadership, stagwell, agency-news
James Calloway
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Market editor covering media and advertising at Marketing Herald.