Hey all,

It was great to see some new work published this month. The latest ReThink Quarterly, a publication we produce with industry-leading client ADP, looks at the importance of lifelong learning. ADP took a risk and invested in a publication that re-affirms their position as leaders in their sector. Content discovery is broken and this kind of approach is a great example of how to own the audience in your sector. Those who make the change now and start building lasting relationships with their audience will become sector superstars. The others will become “digital flotsam in the algorithmic stream.”

Say 'hello' to Storythings

Join us for Proper Fancy on Thursday 26th October. It’s a team show and tell for people who don’t have teams to show and tell with. You’ll get to meet the Storythings team and a load of other creatives. Like previous attendees, you might end up working with us too.

Right, have the best of weekends and enjoy the links.

Hugh

What Makes Great Work Great? (6 min read)

The Story of Aretha’s ‘Natural Woman’ and the Perfect Creative Brief (7 min read)

A Brilliant Short Film on Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia (1 min watch)

10 Things To Remember About Content Strategy (6 min read)

How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes (7 min read)

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore (8 min read)

A Delightful Piece of Content Marketing and World Building (6 min read)

Meet the ‘Anti-Marie Kondo’ Collector and Curator of Tiny Things (3 min read)

The Era of Traffic is Officially Over (7 min read)

Analogy is the Core of Cognition (6 min read)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production agency based in Brighton, London, Berlin, and Ibiza. If your content marketing isn’t cutting through we'd love to help you understand why. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Research – We help B2B brands understand modern attention patterns and how they can get more engagement with content.

2. Content Strategy – We use our bespoke process to develop unique content formats that hold audience attention, build community, and increase brand salience.

3. Content Production – We craft beautiful and diverse stories of impact that capture and hold attention using podcasts, videos, editorial, and newsletters. 

We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

What Makes Great Work Great?
In reference to our ability to know what will be a hit and what won’t, William Goldman once said that “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” But some people know some things. Ian Edgar has worked on some incredibly successful hits in his time making videos for Conde Nast. Here, he writes about how making the familiar feel unfamiliar and giving the audience something that allows them to see with fresh eyes is a good starting point. Familiar but different is something we talk a lot about at Storythings, as do Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️. It’s also something Derek Thompson explores in his excellent book Hit Makers - The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. (6 min read)

The Story of Aretha’s ‘Natural Woman’ and the Perfect Creative Brief
I enjoy reading Ian Leslie because his body of work forms a Venn diagram of three areas I am fascinated by: communications, ideas, and the creative process. Ian tells the story of how Aretha Franklin’s ‘Natural Woman’ came to life as a result of two songwriters having the perfect creative brief. (7 min read)

A Brilliant Short Film on Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia
I love this. Watch to the end and don’t read the description. (1 min watch)

10 Things To Remember About Content Strategy
Lauren Pope has been doing content strategy for years. But as she points out here, even expert practitioners should occasionally revisit and document their definitions and processes. Feel free to agree with or argue about Lauren’s approach. (6 min read)

How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes
The publication Rest of World tells wonderful human stories about the future of tech. It’s very similar to what we used to do with How We Get To Next. For this piece, they analysed 3,000 AI images to see how image generators visualise different countries and cultures. For example, they input five prompts, based on the generic concepts of “a person,” “a woman,” “a house,” “a street,” and “a plate of food.” Then adapted them for different countries: China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. The results show a hugely stereotypical view of the world. Marketing and advertising industries have in recent years made strides in how they represent different groups but the inevitable increase in the use of AI will result in a massive step back. (7 min read)

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore
In 2014 I was in New York working on a content strategy for a client. Whilst looking at their data we noticed that the graph for followers continued to rise but traffic from social had dramatically dropped. To us, it was the first indicator that discovery was broken, that followers did not guarantee views, and that algorithms had a narrow view of what was interesting on the internet. Almost a decade later, Choire Sicha, the co-founder of The Awl and now an editor at New York gives a bunch of reasons why he would like to go back and assassinate 2014: “That was the year of viral phenomena such as Gamergate, when a digital mob of disaffected video-game fans targeted journalists and game developers on social media; Ellen DeGeneres’s selfie with a gaggle of celebrities at the Oscars, which got retweeted millions of times; and the brief, wondrous fame of Alex, a random teen retail worker from Texas who won attention for his boy-next-door appearance. In those events, we can see some of the nascent forces that would solidify in subsequent years: the tyranny of the loudest voices; the entrenchment of traditional fame on new platforms; the looming emptiness of the content that gets most furiously shared and promoted. But at that point they still seemed like exceptions rather than the rule." (8 min read)

A Delightful Piece of Content Marketing and World Building (6 min read)
Oh, this is good. Risky, but very good. The Rochambeau Club sounds like a wonderful place. The perfect place to sip a bottle of Racquet rosé. Only it doesn’t exist. It’s a fabricated, aspirational world designed to market a new wine brand. It’s quirky, fun and maybe a little too clever. But hey, great to see people being this bold in the age of average: “The big lesson here is the obvious one: when everyone else le zigs, le zag. Of all the thousands of wines launched this year, this is the boldest, most original and most memorable. When everyone else is talking about flavour profiles and hints of peach and pairs well with fish, The Rochambeau Club are talking about how the Crown Prince of Värmland will be arriving by hang-glider on Sunday.” Via Tone Knob (6 min read)

Meet the ‘Anti-Marie Kondo’ Collector and Curator of Tiny Things
If you like Instagram accounts that feature collections of things then this is your next follow. (3 min read)

The Era of Traffic is Officially Over
If you’ve been following what we do, or listening to great thinkers like Ben Smith, then you will be aware that the traffic era is dead. But that doesn’t mean the era of good information is dead. We’ll simply have to adapt: “Traffic as a unit of currency simply won’t matter anymore. We will need to develop new ways of acquiring and retaining audiences. The quantity of people may be smaller, but they will more likely be seeking out the information you have. These will be the types of readers we want versus the passive fly-by traffic that we have had over the years. We’ll need to invest more in brand building and direct response marketing.” (7 min read)

Analogy is the Core of Cognition
Six short stories featuring Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, John Mayer and more on how analogy helps us understand and solve problems. (6 min read)

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend, you can subscribe below and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.