Hey all,

Thanks to everyone who joined us for Proper Fancy yesterday. Lots of great links shared by really interesting people. You can see all the goodies on LinkedIn. If you’ve never tried it, join us next month or let me know of you’d like to co-host. We’re a friendly and creative bunch with one thing in common - we all care about doing the hard stuff to make our work the best.

I'd like one of those content audits

A lot of organisations are rethinking their content strategy in light of changes in social, budgets, and other things. Before you start sharpening your axe, you might need a content audit to fully understand what content is or isn’t working. We’ve got a workshop that will help you save money and time whilst giving you clarity on your next steps. Hit the button above to find out more and enquire about a FREE 30 minute consultation.

OK! Enough selling! What’s that I see in the distance? It’s only the bloomin’ weekend. Enjoy the links and I’ll see you all back here next week.

Hugh

World Building and the Glory of Storytelling (4 min read)

Don’t Take Briefs, Make Them (5 min read)

Build. Your. Own. Audience (7 min read)

Video Yes Please - This Week’s Best Videos Made by and For Organisations (multiple videos)

Possessed - The Origin Story of a B2B Marketer (90-second watch)

Data Poisoning Tool Lets Artists Fight Back Against Generative AI (5 min read)

17 Life Lessons From Maria Popova (8 min read)

Blindboy Chats to Naomi Klein (1 hour listen)

Giving Away PDFs to Sell a Magazine (magazine)

Spotify and the Problem of Genres (interactive story)

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. If your content isn’t getting the results you need, let us 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 for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

Free 30 minute consultation

World Building and the Glory of Storytelling
This is a great read from Ana Andjelic on brand marketing and the importance of using good stories to build worlds: “The core premise of a brand universe is to have a simple and clear promise. Each world is built around one, single idea, which is repeated constantly and consistently. This one idea can generate others, but a world always needs to have an anchor - an archetype or a primary emotion. For Apple, it’s creativity. For Disney, it’s magic. For Amazon, it’s convenience. For ESPRIT, it’s fun.” (4 min read)

Don’t Take Briefs, Make Them
Oatly’s ex-Creative Director on being provocative, ambitious and a pain in the arse. In his time at Oatly he made a habit of ignoring new product innovations that weren’t interesting, or by making fun of them: “That doesn’t mean we worked without collaborating with other organization leaders, or that we lacked an understanding of business objectives and upcoming initiatives. It just means we took requests for marketing initiatives as suggestions, not dictations. Because we understood how brands are built. And we knew that, at times, our most impactful work didn’t start with a formal brief tied to a rational strategic objective. It started with someone saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if…’” (5 min read)

Build. Your. Own. Audience
Part 2 of our series Broken looks specifically at how changes in social have impacted businesses that built their audience development strategy on 3rd party platforms, the impact of Apple’s privacy restrictions on D2C businesses, and a fascinating experiment that uncovers how much people would pay for all their friends to leave social media. (7 min read)

Video Yes Please - This Week’s Best Videos Made by and For Organisations
The first episode of this new Substack from Rob Alderson didn’t disappoint. Rob also runs the The Short Doc Club Substack which features here regularly. This new format shares the best videos made by and for organisations. Such as this excellent piece of comedy from the Danish Cancer Society about binge drinking. (multiple videos)

Possessed - The Origin Story of a B2B Marketer
Just in time for Halloween, this piece of content marketing will bring a smile to the face of anyone who works in B2B. (90-second watch)

Data Poisoning Tool Lets Artists Fight Back Against Generative AI
A new tool has been developed to help creators to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. It works by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample. (5 min read)

17 Life Lessons From Maria Popova
Maria Popova’s The Marginalian (once known as Brainpickings) is 17 years old, and to celebrate she has compiled 17 learnings. My favourite is number 7 which states that anything worthwhile takes a long time: “The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.” (8 min read)

Blindboy Chats to Naomi Klein
I’ve been obsessed with Blindboy’s podcast since arriving late to the party early this year. I always learn something from it, whether it is a bit of folklore, a unique take or simply a bit of trivia to drop amongst friends. Anyway, this week he celebrates six years at it by chatting to Naomi Klein. Naomi’s new book Doppelganger looks at how she has spent several years being mistaken for the feminist-turned-conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. They discuss a mirror world in which leftists are pulled into the world of right wing conspiracy, the link between conspiracy, autism and changelings, and why we should be more understanding and less condemning of people who are drawn in. (1 hour listen)

Giving Away PDFs to Sell a Magazine
An interesting strategy shared by Ben Dietz at our Proper Fancy event. Buffalo Zine is giving away its magazine as a PDF to sell the print edition. The current edition has been guest-edited by Cat Power. You should also subscribe to the excellent Ben Dietz newsletter. (magazine)

Spotify and the Problem of Genres
This is a nice visual story on Spotify’s classification of music genres. Hip-hop was born in 1973 but the term wasn’t coined until Rappers Delight broke through in the late 70s. Similarly, Iggy Pop was playing punk in the late 60s long before the music the Sex Pistols played was given a name. Pinning music to genres has always been tricky but essential for discovery. There are over 100,000 songs published on Spotify daily. To classify each tune is to examine the petri-dish of music culture that evolves and mutates every few months and attempt to sort it. It’s a difficult but important job, despite how rarely people may use some genre names in conversation. (interactive story)

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

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