Spotlight on… Ben
Meet Ben Horsley-Summer, the contented ‘beta male’ in the meerkat mob, busy in the burrow getting all the stuff that needs doing done, which, we think, makes him exactly the kind of male every female needs in her life.
As a Creative Consultant for Cosy Meerkat, Ben’s job involves elements of brand design as well as marketing, but can be summed up as making clients look and sound good. As his job title suggests, it’s a highly creative role and, depending on which client he’s working for, his typical day can vary greatly. His ideal day, though, would be a morning spent in his creative element, producing videos or photography for example, followed by an afternoon of getting his head down for some research, copywriting or work on a client’s brand positioning. The first to admit he is precious about ensuring he maximises his creative time, don’t expect Ben to answer your every email within minutes; he has scheduled times in his day for paperwork and phone calls and is a fan of keeping organising and scheduling as simple as possible so he can spend the rest of his day being, well, creative!
Ben tends to find the most common internal comms problem he sees with clients is a lack of confidence when it comes to how creative they can be with their staff communications; the desire is there but, often, people feel constricted either by technology or having to work within a company’s brand guidelines. As a fresh set of eyes, we can help clients come up with new, creative ways to communicate with staff, while staying true to the company’s external brand. Ben can also show you how to use the technology you have, be it Microsoft SharePoint, a particular CMS or mail platform or even a bespoke intranet, to its full potential – something that surprises a lot of people when they realise what it’s possible to do with the tools they already have.
Although a photographer by trade, Ben’s favourite part of the job is rapidly becoming video. It has, he says, been a learning curve because, while there are similarities, things like sound and frame rates can catch you out if you’re not on top of them.
And his most interesting job before working with Cosy Meerkat seems to have involved very little work at all. Flying to LA in his early twenties to photograph a hardcore punk band called Amen, often found on the front pages of NME, Kerrang and Metal Hammer back in the nineties, Ben spent most of his time getting a fast lesson in how to party hard with them and their endless entourage of misfits. Now of an age when he favours a nice cup of herbal tea and a nine pm bedtime, he shudders at the very thought of those times, but he can just about recall that it was actually a lot of fun.
