Everyone is creating content these days. But few are creating something worth paying attention to.
That was one of the clearest themes from Ben Worthen’s conversation with William Salvi for Executive House’s CEO Series, filmed on the ground at this year’s RSAC conference.
Ben started his career in journalism and spent time as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Now, he leads Orchestra’s Product organization, helping turn the company’s integrated capabilities into repeatable, measurable ways of solving client problems.
In the interview, Ben shares a practical view of what it takes to create communications people actually care about in a landscape shaped by fragmented attention, evaporating trust and AI-generated everything.
You can watch the full interview here. Below, we share five takeaways from the conversation.
1. Start with the audience, not the message
Most organizations begin with what they want to say: the announcement, the product, the objective, the talking point.
“Founders and CEOs, people who live and breathe something every day, they can’t help but think it’s interesting. They might even think it’s the most interesting thing in the world,” Ben says. “But truly, nobody cares.”
Before shaping the message, he says, you should be asking what your audience is already thinking about. What problem are they trying to solve? What questions are they asking? What kinds of discussions are they already having? That kind of empathy becomes the foundation of stronger communications.
“If you can think of your job as curating a conversation as opposed to selling your product, being a member of a community as opposed to closing that deal, all of a sudden you put yourself in a position to build a relationship with the people that you're trying to reach,” Ben says.
2. Stop treating attention as the end goal
There’s a difference between getting noticed and building trust. A brand can create buzz online and still fail to create any lasting relationship with the people it wants to reach.
As Ben explains, “You need more than attention. You need credibility.” Did the work make someone more likely to believe you, follow you, recommend you or come back for more? If not, the attention may not have been worth much. It should be the means to an end, not an end in itself.
3. Design for the way information actually moves today
The old communications playbook was built around a narrower media world. Today, Ben says, “everybody gets their information from everywhere” — social media, search, AI, newsletters, podcasts, creators and conversations happening outside a brand’s control.
That means the work has to be more connected. It has to move across formats and, in Ben’s words, “reach people with the right message wherever they are in the way that they are.”
Having a connected strategy matters even more in the age of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), where earned, owned, social and search all shape how a brand shows up in LLM results. AI search reflects the strength and consistency of the whole communications ecosystem, not just one channel.
4. Use AI as a partner, but not as a substitute for judgment
AI has made it dramatically easier to make content. “It actually now takes less time to create content than it does to consume content,” Ben says, “which is sort of a crazy scary thing.”
When used to augment human creativity rather than replace it, AI can make work stronger, helping teams analyze information, spot patterns and move faster. But the strongest storytelling still needs human judgment: taste, empathy, originality and an understanding of what the audience will find useful.
“I think there are things that AI is very good at. And then there are things that AI is less good at,” Ben explains. “We want to be in a position where the AI is doing the thing that the AI is really good at and the people are doing the things that the people are really good at, and they're working together.”
5. Keep asking this question
One of the most useful lessons Ben brought from journalism is also the simplest: “Why does anybody care?”
It forces communicators to be more honest about whether they are adding value or just volume. Before a post, pitch, report or campaign goes out into the world, it asks: What is the point? Why now? Why would this matter to someone who is not already inside the company?
That doesn’t mean every piece of content has to be for everyone. As Ben points out, it’s fine for something to be valuable to just a small set of people, as long as it’s genuinely valuable to them.
The key is to keep putting work through the “Why does anybody care?” filter. “That's probably the best way to come up with something that's worthy of people’s time,” Ben says.
