About
About Ben Jay
Ben Jay is a video and creative leader with over a decade of experience building video functions for global technology brands. He is Head of Video at Trustpilot, where he is building the global video function from scratch, and was previously at Google, where his campaigns won two Webby Awards. He is an NFTS alumnus who works at the intersection of creative vision and operational scale — the ability to make work that connects and the systems to make it repeatedly, at pace, across a global brand.
What does Ben Jay do?
He builds "story engines" — the teams, systems, and relationships that let a company tell its stories consistently, not just once. The best video teams feel like small creative studios, where creative ambition and operational excellence reinforce each other rather than compete. That means two things at once: creative vision (formats and stories people actually connect with) and operational scale (the intake, triage, and tooling that turn ambition into a reliable output). Most leaders are strong on one side; the value is in doing both.
What has he built and led?
At Google he grew from a shooting producer to leading the video department — ultimately managing 26 producers across the US and Europe. Along the way he ran the EMEA video team as manager, overseeing every region's output and a team of producers, editors, a studio technician and two studios. His campaigns earned two Webby Awards, grew the Chrome Developers YouTube channel from roughly 400,000 to 600,000 subscribers, and produced work spanning five continents. His Google Women in Tech series was a 2× Webby winner with 3M+ views in its first month on a $1M budget. As Head of Video at Trustpilot he is now building the global video function from zero — defining the visual language and shifting the brand toward human-led stories rather than testimonials alone.
How does he approach video?
Four principles run through the work:
- Story first. Every team is sitting on stories worth telling; the job is building the relationships and intake systems that surface them.
- Democratise, don't gatekeep. Give internal teams self-serve templates and toolkits so they can make on-brand content independently — freeing the video team for the work only it can do.
- Raise the ceiling. AI and automation raise the floor; reinvest the time saved into craft — better formats, stories, and technique.
- Protect the makers. Creative people do their best work shielded from noise, so a tiered triage system absorbs the noise before it reaches them.
Background
Before Trustpilot and Google, Ben learned story at Monocle and made 25-minute local TV shows for Notts TV. A few years into his career he took a diploma in writing and producing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). Across those roles he has worked as a hands-on video producer and director as well as a team leader — and the throughline is the same: turning business goals into video people actually want to watch.
The rest of the time
Outside the day job, Ben has spent years writing and making comedy — radio sketch shows, a sitcom told entirely from a baby's point of view, and online series mocking workplace and influencer culture. These days more of that curiosity goes into experimenting with AI as a creative co-pilot, including building an entire pitch (and a chat co-pilot to explain it) with AI tools. It's usually where he learns the most.
Ben Jay is Head of Video at Trustpilot, building its global video function from scratch, and previously led video at Google. Get in touch →