Mission North’s Content Studio Celebrates its 10-Year Anniversary

Back in October 2012, over lunch at The Thirsty Bear in downtown San Francisco, I met with PR executive Bill Bourdon to talk about a job opportunity at his agency. I was working at CNET, feeling burnt out from more than two decades of daily deadlines and ready for a change. I was envisioning working for a non-profit, but former editor and long-time mentor Dana Gardner connected me with Bill and said he had a role I might be interested in. 

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Over tapas and beers, Bill laid out his vision of forming a group of writers (“content strategists” in PR parlance) at Mission North to help their tech clients more authentically tell their stories to the world, and he was looking for someone to lead the group. He and Partner Tyler Perry, now co-CEOs at Mission North, had been watching a major shift happening in the media industry. With the rise in digital content and social media, and newsrooms beginning to shrink and consolidate, they saw  journalist-grade content as the future of PR and strategic communications.

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This would not be writing press releases, Bill said, but mining founders’ and other executives’ minds to get their thoughts on what they saw happening in the industry, their insights about the future of technology, and their personal stories. The content strategists would take that information and help them craft their perspectives into op-eds, editorial commentary, and content for social media. It piqued my interest. That opportunity, and the fact that Mission North had a cybersecurity practice and I thought Bill was someone I could work with, led me to meet the rest of the team and eventually accept the job. 

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Not surprisingly, there was a wave of journalists getting hired by tech companies starting around that period. Joining Mission North seemed like a big leap to me at the time, but it turned out to be a great fit and it was exciting to be ahead of the curve in launching a dedicated business unit within a PR firm specifically for content creation.

‍Journalists, Writers and Content Strategists

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That time marked a period of fast growth for our company and as our portfolio and practice groups expanded, so did our stable of content strategists. More than 20 full-time writers and content strategists have at one time or another worked for the Mission North Content Studio, nearly half of whom were former journalists. As we formalized our processes and expanded our offerings, long-time comms expert and spreadsheet guru Paula Cavagnaro joined to lend her operational skills. When she left, Lauren Scherr, who is an amazing writer with limitless other skills, took on that role. Today, James Niccolai, a former colleague from IDG News Service, is my partner in leading the Content Studio and works with enterprise clients. 

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We have a number of other former journalists and writers on the team:

• China Louise Martens, another former IDGer and ex-industry analyst who works with enterprise clients
• Chris Heine, former Adweek reporter who works with commerce and supply chain
• Allie Carmichael, a creative writer and overall content guru who works on Future of Work accounts
• Dan Gunderman, an author and former staff writer for Information Security Media Group, who works with cybersecurity clients
• Julia Bennett, a former broadcast journalist-turned marketing expert who works on LifeSciences accounts
• Julia Kelson, who started out in PR before transitioning to content with a focus on Future of Work
• Alexis-Brianna Felix has a hybrid PR-content background and specializes in the areas of Future of Work, Fintech and Venture Capital. 

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Over the past few years, the Content Studio has been expanding its design and digital capabilities so we can tell stories visually and amplify the thought leadership and other content we create for clients. Yuliya Kim heads our Design group and Allison Gittings leads the Digital and Insights group. Nicole Messier is overseeing the merging of these two groups under the Integrated Studio umbrella. 

<split-lines>"Over the past few years, the Content Studio has been expanding its design and digital capabilities so we can tell stories visually and amplify the thought leadership and other content we create for clients.<split-lines>

Beats, Blog Posts and Op-Eds

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In the Content Studio we approach things much like a newsroom where reporters have beats they cover. Depending on their subject matter expertise, our content strategists are paired with a practice group (or two) and they are embedded on those accounts. Our practice groups run the gamut from Trust, Future Stack and Fintech to Life Sciences, Commerce & Supply Chain and Future of Work, and more recently Sustainability, Consumer and Corporate.

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We have placed about 1,000 op-eds (also known in PR as “bylines”) in the past decade—from The Wall Street Journal and Wired to Scientific American and Harvard Business Review. We’ve collaborated on contributed content and written blog posts, research reports, case studies, and ebooks for hundreds of clients, from big brands such as LinkedIn and Snowflake, as well as numerous startups and non-profit clients.

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We also have an active blog, Dispatch—managed by China and Dan—where we write about industry trends and important topics, events we host and those we attend, and interview industry experts, such as Tenable CMO Brian Goldfarb, Quentin Clark of General Catalyst and AiLun Ku of the Opportunity Network nonprofit, and reporters including Ruth Umoh, Leadership Editor at Fortune and Charlotte Jee, news editor at MIT Technology Review.

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We like to highlight our employees, our work culture, our accolades and our E3thos program. And we’ve even created two Mission North cookbooks, in 2020 and 2021! The Content Studio also conducts agency-wide trainings on writing, editing and content and digital strategy and has created a path for employees on the PR side of the company to join the Content Studio if they want to focus on writing.

<split-lines>"We have placed about 1,000 op-eds (also known in PR as “bylines”) in the past decade—from The Wall Street Journal and Wired to Scientific American and Harvard Business Review."<split-lines>

Integrated Content, Digital, Design and Insights

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We take a holistic approach to content, developing strategy that best ties in with the clients’ business objectives and integrates digital and design campaigns as much as possible. We start by gathering insights to inform our strategy. We conduct research into the executives, the conversations happening in their industry, and their audience. Then we do in-depth interviews with the executives to find out what they are passionate about, what stories they want to tell and get their unique perspectives and opinions. From there we develop executive thought leadership platforms with integrated strategies for reaching the audiences they want to speak to through various owned and earned channels. This enables us to extend the life and reach of the thought leadership content we develop for clients through visual storytelling and across social and editorial platforms. Highlights of our integrated work include this LinkedIn Live event for Tenable and social content for UPSIDE Foods.

We’ve come a long way in 10 years, and it’s exciting to see the momentum we’ve achieved with our integration efforts. But we won’t stop there. Technology and science are driving historic levels of innovation, transformation and chaos. We have never been more digitally connected, nor divided and distrustful. In a world that’s speeding up, warming up and getting more digital, content is essential to advancing solutions to the biggest challenges of our time. Looking into the future, we're building our content capabilities with this vision in mind because we believe a great story can change everything when the right audience gets behind it.