Melissa Rosenthal has been shaping the future of branded content for decades. She built the branded content revenue model at BuzzFeed in its heyday, then joined Cheddar, a live media news network that monetized by building branded segments into its programming. 

When Cheddar was sold to a cable news company, Rosenthal pivoted to become the first CMO at ClickUp, helping it grow from Series A to Series C over four years. Then she decided to take all she had learned and build something of her own – Outlever Media.

[The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

Tell me about Outlever and your approach to branded content.

I’d been building this company in the background with my co-founder, Jeff Cafone. Our premise was that at all these news companies, we're building branded news to sell into advertisers, so that they could create branded content, and there's so much money in this, but they have limited distribution and they don't have full ownership. And then thinking about all my challenges when I worked in B2B – I had a huge marketing budget, but it's really hard to build content, thought leadership, trust and credibility, at scale. And outbound sales, which needs to be completely rethought on the B2B side. 

So at Outlever, we effectively took that model and flipped it on its head and said, well, what if we just build productized news publications for companies?

We basically create news publishers in a box. At scale, we're able to spin up Vox, Verge-style news sites, publish hundreds of articles every month on behalf of these companies, and allow them to own not only the things that they want to own in their space, but things that their customers are talking about every day. 

So how does that work?

The news is the news, the story is the story, but we start reaching out to your ICP set to contribute, and when we respin the article, it takes on completely new legs. So we can have one news article that actually has 10 versions with different perspectives, that turns into 10 different articles that then touch on larger trends across multiple industries. 

We're thinking about what it means to be the news, own the news, create a thought leadership platform. And then when we're doing that outreach based on who we speak to, we're building relationships with our customers' customers. So instead of cold outreach, we're making them look great, we're positioning them as heroes, we're saying, here, we're giving you a thought leadership platform on a silver platter. Let's allow you to speak about what you care about and then give you the assets to share that and empower you to become your own thought leader in your space.

How do you scale something like this? 

The product that we've been building for the past year and a half is a mix of a very, very, very robust media listening algorithm that effectively scans hundreds of millions of signals every day. It's literally this living, breathing model that listens to everything: websites, company blogs, existing trade publications, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, like every podcast, anything you can imagine that's being produced. It's being vacuumed in by us as a signal. And then we're spinning up those signals and we're doing a first pass of an AI-generated article in kind of an Axios-style format.

Then we have a team of freelance journalists who have written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg, everywhere. And they're doing a second pass, spinning it based on the outreach that we get and turning it into an edited, formatted article.

The reality of what we built on the AI side, in terms of article creation, is that it's getting really good. And right now, I know there's definitely a skepticism of AI-generated content, but I can tell you, we've side-by-sided a Bloomberg editor's piece and our piece untouched, and where we've gotten with our prompting and our machine, it's almost indistinguishable whether a person or AI wrote it. We've built a deeply robust system of editorial prompts that allows it to get the format we need.

Our metric of efficiency is, how quickly can our editors edit the pieces that our product is creating, effectively? The goal is two minutes. Right now we're at eight, so it's really really close.

I'm so interested in this because talking about AI in this way is a little bit scary, but I also want to be on top of the wave. I'm interested in people using it in ways that are ethical and transparent and helpful.

Journalism is in a pretty interesting flux in time, right? There are two schools of thought from the people that we speak to. Some of the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg-type people that want nothing to do with this – they're like, “we want to tell the stories of the world and nothing is ever going to change.” Well, that's not what we believe. We're just in a very different school of thought.

Then there are others who say, "we see exactly what's happening to our industry, and we want to be a part of that change, and we want to be able to help create it, and help shift it, and help usher in the new wave of what this looks like, rather than fight it." Those are the people that we're typically working with. 

When we're talking to people in interviews, we say, "Hey, we just want to let you know, this is the ultimate goal, to make this really efficient for you so that human and machine can work in tandem and make this a super efficient process.” The content needs to be high quality. Our customers really care about that.

Zooming out, do you feel like there's a future media world where there's room for boots-on-the-ground, feature style reporting, as well as this kind of work?

We're kind of doing versions of that now. When we’re covering conferences, we're taking the news from the conference, interviewing the ICP, and then we're taking it through the same editing style. That’s like our version of breaking news.

Who are some of your clients?

We have 10 customers that are either live or in the process of getting live. We’re industry agnostic, from seed to public company. One is one of the largest HR payroll companies in its base. There’s a no-code tool, marketing tool, enterprise security, an agency, project management, surplus energy equipment. Some of them are very niche industries because they don't have any other way to market and they need to become thought leaders in their space.

We're finding a nice sweet spot there, where their problem is very different from other problems. One company, they need to digitize factory floors, that's their product. When they're thinking about how they market to the decision maker of that area, that person doesn't even know this product exists. We have to educate them, so we focus content on efficiency, technology, regulation, anything that would come into their area so that we can start to weave in the narrative.

One of our clients is Insurely, a large home insurance company in Canada, and they sell through channel partners. So we're trying to reach mortgage brokers, real estate brokers, the people that will end up selling, building those relationships. So for instance, this article, “New mortgage rules aim to boost home ownership in high-cost markets” – this is one of the biggest stories to come out of Canada in the mortgage space in quite some time. So we are reaching out to consulting services, getting a quote from this consultant, Benjamin. We then spin the article based on what Benjamin says and then we shift that back to Benjamin for him to share. 

We then reach out to a broker with the same article, same concept, but his perspective on it is much different, because obviously he's looking at it through a different lens. So we're going to take this one big story and blow it out to like a hundred micro stories. 

We also realized that to really reach their ICP at scale, we needed to cover everything happening in Canada as it relates to home insurance. So we cover real estate, economy, national news, tech, weather, provinces. It really spans everything.

My co-founder and I are both very cynical about distribution; we don't believe anyone is going to this page outside of the individual that we're quoting in the article, and anyone that person is sharing downstream with on LinkedIn. No one's going to Insurely News to see what's happening in Canada. But it allows us to create this horizontal publication that can cover all these weird topics so they're having the conversations that they need to be having in their market. 

That was my next question – how do you handle distribution?

Yeah, we're not trying to push people to this page, but we're doing hundreds, if not thousands, of outreach points, like one-to-one outreach with our customers’ ICPs every month to get them quoted in the articles. We create native share assets for them for LinkedIn, native prompts so they can share their thought leadership. And then our customers also share that out as well, they tag them in the posts. You see this network effect in the engagement that's happening in the comments, and that's really where the value is here. 

We're also indexing the sites to show up in Google News Publisher as a trade publication. And because these companies are publishing at such high volume and they're also building blogs, they have a lot of domain authority. 

I know you obviously see LinkedIn as a big platform; are there other platforms that you see as really valuable for your customers? 

I think the one-to-one email is very valuable. We're building an editorial relationship with this person we’re emailing. Some of them we've already quoted five times because they've become a part of our network and they're becoming a part of that company's network.

LinkedIn is definitely what we are optimizing for with the ability to have meaningful conversations that actually drive action. I've seen it myself – I've been building on LinkedIn for the past eight years, and the past five years, I've posted every single day. And when I launched this company, we booked 200 demo calls, and all of them were inbound.

At ClickUp, one of my big initiatives was turning our executives into media channels. I believed that their distribution of everything happening with the company for their specific ICP set would make us so much more valuable than having a company-led page. I knew that our VP of engineering had a ton of engineering folks in his network, because he used to work at Atlassian and Workday. And our VP of product, well, he's got a completely different network. So when you're thinking about the positioning, it’s like, let's take this one piece of information and change it for the ICP that you're trying to reach, let's use the people as the channels.

I love that; I can imagine that's an easier sell to executives. You can say to people, we want you to become a thought leader, and if they don't think of themselves that way, they don't want to be the thought leader. But if you say, you can become the media channel, why wouldn’t you want to share something that your potential customer cares about?

So, what do you say to potential customers on the fence about investing in content?

The reality is they all know they need to invest in content, in thought leadership. They're just not quite sure how to do it, with efficiency being important internally. We do 99% of this for them; if they don't want to touch this at all, it runs without them. 

I think the brands that have started investing in content already see the benefits in doing it, but the scale is the problem. The biggest concern is quality, always. They don't want just a bunch of AI-generated stories. This isn't that. Once we make them feel good about the type of content, the way that we view it, it's a yes.

Hey, wasn’t that a great interview? Did you notice how important LinkedIn has become in order to build a business, stand out in your field, or get noticed for just about anything professionally?

If you’re not sure where to start with building your own brand (or, as Melissa would say, becoming a media channel), I can help with that!

Email me to get started, or check out this free, fun little guide I created that gives you 6 reasons to be active on LinkedIn, even when you’re not selling or job searching.

What I’m writing/reading/watching/cooking

Because a marketer is only as good as their creative (and culinary) inputs.

PERSONAL ESSAY 📝 “My toddler sleeps in bed with us. Everyone gets more sleep this way.” I wrote this for Business Insider!

FICTION 📖 I Dreamed of Falling, by Julia Dahl. I could not put this one down, I read it in two days. It’s as much a murder mystery as it is a novel about grief and flawed, real characters trying to repair long-damaged relationships under tough life circumstances. Also so refreshing to see characters in a non-traditional relationship that’s not scandalized.

TV SHOW 📺 The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. HEAR ME OUT. I don’t watch much reality TV but this show had me GRIPPED. It follows a very predictable rich-lady unscripted series format, but the addition of the shared religion, and how closely or not each of them follow the religious rules and norms of the Mormon church, adds a fascinating twist. Plus it’s only 8 episodes.

FOOD 🍔 Rachel Halldorson’s Big Mac Taquitos. Please trust me on this one, too. They’re made with ground turkey and can be popped in an air fryer or oven. Make it exactly as written and you will NOT be sorry. And follow her on Instagram for extremely soothing recipe videos.

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