Meet Beth

Hello! I’m Beth, token Australian at team Essential. Despite my origins, I don’t live in Clapham or Shepherd’s Bush, I don’t drink at the Walkabout (…very often) and I will feign indifference about the Ashes. Unless of course we win.

I joined Essential in November 2007 as a Research Manager. Before that I’d worked in varying research capacities in Sydney – with humble beginnings in my university days as a telephone interviewer in a market research firm (the novelty of phoning strangers to ask them about toothpaste and olive oil quickly wore off). Later I worked as an intern, then a fully fledged researcher at the social and government research firm Urbis on all manner of projects; health, ageing, homelessness, media and communications, law and justice, Indigenous issues, drug research, you name it.

Nowadays my role at Essential is primarily as a qualitative researcher, which I find to be a job with dual pleasures. One is working with a diverse range of interesting media clients – among them the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Ofcom and O2. The other is travelling across the UK, meeting a raft of people I would never meet otherwise, who consistently tell me genuinely interesting things about their relationship with various media platforms and services. It’s never, ever dull.

…and if there’s a third , slightly secret pleasure, it’s the range of accents in the UK. It might be a cliché, but coming from a very large island with a uniform accent, it’s a source of delight to come across so many accents crammed into a fairly small island.

Beyond the office – and in the spirit of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s lovely short film Foutaises (1990)…

- here’s some Things I Like, Things I Hate.

Things I Like

1. Streaming music for free! (www.spotify.com)