This week, I'm excited to share an interview I did recently with Ben Worthen, founder of content agency Message Lab. Ben's one of my role models in the content business, as he's built Message Lab into a standout content agency – one of the few to effectively combine top-notch storytelling and the effective use of metrics. He's also been generous with his advice and support to me over the years, so I was especially excited to catch up with him and get him "on record" about how Message Lab has been so successful.
Ben started Message Lab because he believed that organizations would get better results if they talked more about topics people care about and less about their products. He also understood that convincing the world that this is the case would require data to prove it.
Before Message Lab, Ben was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the tech industry and wrote more than 50 Page One stories. He was also editor-in-chief at Ready State and head of content at Sequoia Capital. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Message Lab was named 2024 Agency of the Year by the Content Marketing Institute.
This is the latest in a series of interviews I'm doing with top content creators, editors, and writers. Subscribe now so you don't miss anything:
Q: What is Message Lab up to these days? You’ve been acquired, right? Tell me where things stand now.
Ben Worthen: Yes, we’re part of Orchestra, a new company made up of BerlinRosen and other companies it’s acquired. We’re working to integrate everything into one modern communications firm. The goal is to meet the way people engage with content today, engage with and consume information, which is, as you know, less and less through traditional media and more through a broad mix of everything, everywhere, all at once.
Q: How do you describe the Message Lab piece of that, within Orchestra?
Ben: We’re like the “Intel inside” of Orchestra. We’re good at finding and telling stories. We're good at using digital channels to get in front of people. And we're good at measuring the results.
What we don’t do is earned media—that’s not in our skill set. But other parts of Orchestra specialize in that. Together, we aim to make the work more strategic, grounded in data, and aligned with how people consume information.
“Most people only want to buy something about 5% of the time, and the rest of the time they just want to be entertained.”
Q: The shift from earned to owned media is a trend I hear a lot about, especially in tech. What’s your perspective?
Ben: Earned media will always matter as long as outlets like The New York Times or TechCrunch exist. In tech, a lot of founders and VCs have already decided, “We're going to focus on owned media instead of earned, because we control it.” But outside tech, there are a lot of organizations that still just think of communications as PR.
We’re working to shift that mindset, helping them understand the relationships between social media, search, and earned media, and how we can get those things to work together.
Q: How has Message Lab’s approach evolved since its early days?
Ben: Conceptually, the ideas are all the same — and it feels totally coherent to me. But if I sat down seven years ago and you said this is what Message Lab will look like today, I wouldn’t have believed it! But the worldview is the same.
It really was originally an anti-product marketing message. Like, most people only want to buy something about five percent of the time, and 95% of the time they just want to be entertained or educated. If you are a tent company and you’re trying to sell me a tent, the question of what tent I should buy is something that I’m only going to think about very fleetingly. Most of the time, I’ll be thinking about where to go, what food to bring, what exercises to do, or how to convince their kids to come along—not about which tent to buy.
If you’re a tent company and all you ever do is offer 10% off tent coupons, you’re missing the chance to engage with me. Meanwhile, your competitor, who’s been offering helpful camping tips and talking to me about how to plan my trip — that’s the one I’m probably going to buy from.
“A great story, well told, is much more valuable than a 10% off coupon.”
Q: What do you say to CEOs who push back, arguing it’s too much effort to produce content beyond promoting their products?
Ben: Our day-one idea was that a great story, well told, is more valuable than a 10% off coupon. But it is harder to measure. Everybody knows how to measure the value of that coupon. You add up the amount you spent on the campaign, and the amount of the discount, and measure how many people clicked and bought the tent. And you can say, we spent a million dollars on coupons, which generated $2 million in revenue.
A great story or useful content creates value that’s harder to quantify but ultimately more impactful. But if you say, we spent a million dollars on beautiful photos and videos and articles about travel, and boy, do we love it! You know who’s going to get the funding.
it's not enough to just believe that other stuff is better, you have to be able to use data to show it.
So everything about the company's evolution since then has been a process of looking at data, how people consume content, and what sort of multi-step journeys people take, then using that to inform our growth roadmap.
So when we learned that we needed to reach people effectively through email, we gained expertise in email so we could deliver that.
When we needed to get more people to come to our clients’ websites from search, we developed search optimization skills. When it turned out people spend more time reading content that's beautiful, we learned to design better.
We’re using the tools and tactics of performance marketing but in the service of brand and communications. We are aiming to be the connective tissue between the world of comms and brand and the world of performance and outcomes.
Q: Your team includes top-tier journalistic talent. How have you attracted such strong writers to a content marketing agency?
Ben: There are certainly some cases where you can do better journalism in this context than you can in a news organization. Pretty much everything that I've done at Message Lab has had a higher budget than the equivalent budget for my time in newspapers. Our reporters can tell really good stories. They can dig in deep. And if you create an environment where people who have really good storytelling chops can work with other people who have really good storytelling chops, they like that.
We pay freelancers fairly, and they know they’re going to be edited by a top-notch editor who values their craft.
It’s about telling meaningful, well-crafted stories, and I think that resonates with talented writers.
“AI is very good at doing mediocre writing. Considering how much bad writing there is out there, mediocre is a huge improvement.”
Q: Let’s talk about AI. Are you using it at Message Lab?
Ben: Yes, but primarily for analysis of data. It turns out that AI can read a thousand articles significantly faster than any human. We use it for some concepting. It’s also helpful for generating drafts of things like memos or summaries, where the stakes aren’t high.
That said, it’s not good enough to be publishable yet. Our differentiation is with quality work—great storytelling and writing. AI might get there eventually, but for now, it’s very good at doing mediocre writing.
Considering how much bad writing there is out there, mediocre is a huge improvement. It's not good writers that have to worry about AI right now — it’s far more useful to help bad writers improve, so they can communicate information better.
Q: Tell me more about that analysis piece. How are you using AI to analyze things?
Ben: Just from a volume standpoint, it can create data sets out of things that would be impossible for a human, like analyzing thousands of web pages to identify key themes, tone analysis, or to tell you what’s missing. Even if a human was able to read a thousand pages like that, you would never be able to keep track of them. I would trust an AI to do that better than a human.
But when it comes to creativity and connection, people still do it best. Storytelling is about understanding and engaging your audience in ways that machines can’t replicate—at least not yet.
