An Ad Agency Doubled Into An Aircraft Factory

Innocean USA signed a 101,000 sf lease at Hackman Capital Partners' 888 N. Douglas campus in El Segundo for its U.S. headquarters, relocating from 50,000 sf in Huntington Beach and consolidating roughly 600 employees now spread across multiple buildings. Occupancy follows construction completion in 2027. JLL's Jason Fine, Jeff Ingham and Mitch Lundquist advised Innocean; Hackman represented itself.

The 30-acre, four-building, roughly 550,000 sf campus is a converted Northrop Grumman military aircraft manufacturing facility. Innocean will use part of the space as a production facility for commercials and content.

Derived: +51,000 sf, a 102% increase in footprint; 168.3 sf per employee after the move versus 83.3 sf today at roughly 600 headcount; Innocean takes 18.4% of the campus, which itself runs 42.1% site coverage across 30 acres. Rent and lease term were not disclosed.

An agency doubling its office footprint in 2026 is itself worth noting. Doing it by moving into a 1950s military aircraft plant is the part that carries information.

Innocean is not buying prestige square footage. Part of the space is a production facility — commercials and content shot in-house. That requires ceiling height, floor area, power and loading, which is the specification of an aircraft assembly building and emphatically not the specification of a new Class A office tower.

Hackman Capital's business is exactly this: acquiring obsolete industrial and defense facilities and converting them into creative and production space. The company has built a portfolio on the recognition that the physical attributes production tenants need were already built, decades ago, for entirely different reasons — and cannot be economically reproduced at today's costs.

The per-employee math is the second read. Moving from 83.3 sf per person to 168.3 is not a company hedging on attendance. Consolidating 600 people from multiple buildings into one, with a purpose-built production floor, is a bet on people being in the room.

Implications. The tenants expanding hardest into office space are the ones whose requirements cannot be met by new office construction. Owners of convertible mid-century industrial in supply-constrained coastal submarkets hold a genuinely scarce product, and the scarcity widens every quarter construction costs rise.

Date note: primary coverage of this lease ran in August 2026. It is presented here as a standing commitment rather than breaking news.