Scout Lab Turned Purpose Into a Client Filter - Then Made It Measurable

The first strange thing about Scout Lab is that its origin story begins with a defeat. It was late 2016. Kaitlyn Barclay had moved from San Francisco to New York after working at a startup acquired by ClassPass and then leading acquisition marketing at Levi Strauss. Willow Hill had been Airbnb’s first brand hire, helping the company grow from its first reservation to tens of millions. They met after an election in which, as Barclay later put it, storytelling had been weaponized. The lesson was uncomfortable: a good story was not necessarily a good thing. It was an instrument. The question was who would pick it up.

The pair founded Scout Lab in 2017 with an answer that sounded broad: build purpose-driven brands. The agency would serve founders trying to push culture toward something better. It would bring startup fluency to brand strategy, design, campaigns and communications. And it would do the work as a women-led firm in an industry where women-owned creative agencies remain rare.

Then the vocabulary got mushy. “Purpose-driven” became the sort of phrase that could sit beside a stock photograph of hands around a sapling. Scout Lab changed its mind about the usefulness of that wide label. The company narrowed its stated specialty to human and planetary health - reproductive care, heart health, healthcare navigation, conservation, circular materials. The change is more than positioning copy. It is a filter on the clients the agency pursues and the problems it is equipped to understand.

A company’s awkward middle

Scout Lab sells three families of service. “Brand” includes industry and customer research, positioning, naming, identity, packaging and websites. “Campaign” covers the big idea, creative production, photography and film. “Communication” includes messaging, thought leadership, media strategy, press relations and owned content. These are familiar agency ingredients. Their arrangement is the point.

A startup at an inflection point often has an awkward middle. The product has advanced faster than the story. The visual identity belongs to an earlier, smaller company. The founder can explain the idea beautifully in a room, but the website cannot. A branding studio can repair the identity; a PR shop can place the story; a production company can shoot the campaign. Scout Lab’s pitch is that these things are one problem. A promise that changes as it crosses each hand is not a brand. It is a telephone game with a media budget.

“At the end of the day, you’re actually just human to human.”Willow Hill on the Hello Heart campaign

The heart monitor was not the audience

The cleanest example is Hello Heart, a digital heart-health program sold through employers. The usual B2B temptation is to speak in the language of benefits managers: utilization, adoption, population health. Scout Lab’s “Dot-to-Dot” campaign did something simpler. It connected ordinary acts and missed medications to the health outcomes hiding behind them. The buyer might have “HR” on a badge, but she was also someone with a body, a family and a short attention span.

The campaign won the 2023 Digiday Award for Best B2B Branding Campaign. Its reported click-through rate was 0.23 percent, above the cited industry benchmark. The number is modest in the way useful advertising numbers often are. No fireworks, just evidence that an emotionally legible idea can move a professional audience.

Healthee presented a related problem. The platform uses AI to help employees understand health benefits, a category already burdened by jargon and suspicion. Scout Lab first tried to understand what the technology changed for a person. The key decision was to stop making AI the hero. The identity instead revolved around a ripple: clarity about a plan can affect money, time, care and the people around you. The palette moved away from healthcare’s reflexive blues and greens toward poppy red, black, white and warmer gradients. The product could still be technical. The relationship did not have to feel cold.

When waste became the art supply

CASETiFY’s recycling program posed a different communications problem. Recycling claims tend to become arithmetic: units diverted, percentages recovered, target year announced. For the 2023 Re/CASETiFY Earth Day campaign, Scout Lab made the discarded material visible. Artists Harry Nuriev, Nik Bentel and Jaehun Oh received old phone cases and turned them into one-off pieces. The agency conceived the campaign and produced films of the artists working in their studios. Activations appeared in Seoul; drop-off points appeared in Los Angeles.

The campaign reported 57 million in reach and 2.8 million engagements. The copyable lesson is not “hire three artists.” It is to turn the mechanism into the message. If circularity matters, let the audience watch a discarded object change states. If care matters, show the relief rather than the software. If access matters, as it does in Scout Lab’s communications work for abortion-care provider Hey Jane, use precise language and prepare for litigation and crisis conditions before they arrive.

Purpose, with a purchase order

Scout Lab operates as a premium boutique, selling projects and ongoing communications relationships to venture-backed startups, challenger brands and public companies. A third-party agency directory lists a minimum engagement above $10,000 and an estimated hourly rate of $200 to $300. That is not an official rate card, but it locates the firm in the market: this is considered, high-touch work, not a logo bought by the pound.

Its alternatives are not only other integrated agencies. A buyer could assemble a brand studio, PR firm and production shop, or hire specialists in-house. Scout Lab makes the most sense when the problem crosses those boundaries and the company is changing quickly. It makes less sense when a brief is purely tactical, the buyer wants anonymous execution, or “purpose” exists only in the campaign and not in the operating decisions behind it. A communications firm can sharpen a truth. It cannot manufacture one safely.

This is also where Scout Lab’s culture becomes part of the commercial argument. Its published values - question the rules, speak up, favor nuance over norms, take it personally - read like creative provocations. One policy gave them weight. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the agency introduced reimbursement for employees who needed to travel for reproductive or abortion care. The company did not merely make values-facing work for Hey Jane; it absorbed a related cost itself.

The useful bit to steal

There are five moves worth copying. Pick a client filter that rules something out. Bring research, identity, campaign and distribution into the same early conversation. Talk to the human behind the buying title. Make an invisible mechanism visible. Publish outcomes that expose the work to judgment.

None requires the phrase “purpose-driven.” In fact, Scout Lab’s own evolution suggests the phrase matters less than the constraint behind it. The founders began with a reaction to political storytelling and an ambition to use their skills differently. They later replaced a generous category with a more demanding one. The agency became easier to understand when it chose what it was for.

That may be Scout Lab’s most durable piece of strategy. A brand is not the decoration applied after a company decides what to do. It is the visible record of those decisions. When the decisions are coherent, the agency can make them travel. When they are not, even very handsome work eventually tells on you.