Ben Cruz

Ben Cruz is the founder of Gold Rhino, a Brooklyn-based brand and creative studio. Before that, he was co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of A Different Kind of Animal and Chief Creative Officer of Fly Communications. His work is built on one conviction: a story only works if the people it’s meant to reach can see their truths resonating in it. His current work is the brand and creative platform for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s $1.5 billion bicentennial campaign, RPI Forward, built from interviews with donors and alumni whose lived histories with the school, before and after it, became the campaign’s pillars.

At A Different Kind of Animal, it meant designing Shaker, a shared academic platform for twenty-three Paris schools, built only after two months listening to their students and faculty; and sitting with the Black community BET was rebuilt for, until “we got you” actually meant something to the people feeling it.

It meant speaking with seventeen Okinawan distilleries to understand Awamori culturally before building Ryukyu 1429’s brand around the three master distillers who trusted the international team with their story; and sitting with Ducati’s own dealers to find where sales were breaking down before building a campaign disciplined enough to guarantee its results: 2.2 million impressions, 649 dealer leads at half the historical cost per lead.

At Fly Communications, it meant understanding the relationship between a reader and a physical book well enough to launch the Amazon Kindle, a new category that would herald the iPad, and introducing what was then called Amazon Grocery, now Amazon Fresh, expanding a brand known at the time only for books. It also meant sitting inside the private argument a drinker has with themselves before getting behind the wheel, then building Pernod Ricard’s responsibility campaign around those exact excuses instead of lecturing past them, an idea that traveled to five languages across three continents.

Every one of those projects started the same way: by listening first. The people whose stories he told entrusted him with their voice and their point of view. Safeguarding both, not just capturing them, was always the job. That’s what Ben brings to Van Alen’s board: the belief that a structure’s story only retains its integrity if the people who live within it are still the ones telling it.