Finding Your Audience, How to Fix Marketing and Unskippable Title Sequences

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10 stories we've enjoyed this week

Hi All,
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OK. Time for some stories. Have a fabulous weekend.
Hugh

The Short Story

How to Find and Engage Your Audience
(8 min read)

A Good Talk on the Challenge For Dysfuntional Company Culture
(9 min read)

Unskippable Opening Title Sequences
(1 min read)

Tone Knob: How the Scouts Changed Their Tone of Voic e
(6 min read)

Jony Ive on What Focus Really is
(90 sec watch)

A Thread of Fascinating Generation-Defining Stats
(Thread)

Marketing Unf*cked: Why You Need a Content Audit
(20 min listen)

Discover MoMA's Modern Art with Each New Browser Tab
(Chrome plug-in)

Hacks For Traveling With Children
(list)

The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book
(1 min read)

The title sequence for severance shows a man and woman fully clothed. They are lying on a bed in the middle of a large empty room. A light enters the room from the right.

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The Full Story

How to Find and Engage Your Audience
Whilst this was written for Substack writers by the audience team at Substack, it's absolutely solid advice for anyone who wants to find and build an audience. What's great about it is that it's filled with great examples of how their community members have built audiences following these steps. Bookmark this.
(8 min read)

A Good Talk on the Challenge For Dysfunctional Company Culture
Bruce Daisley, author, tech leader and host of the 'Eat Sleep Work Repeat' podcast, recently gave a talk at the Economist on the subject of dysfunctional company culture. He's provided annotated slides that link out to a bunch of interesting studies, books and stories. There's a great description of what good company culture is as well as the one thing that can destroy it. Via Neil Perkin's excellent newsletter.
(9 min read)

Unskippable Opening Title Sequences
I'm obsessed with opening title sequences. At a time when we're encouraged to skip them, my admiration for those that raise the bar only increases. As Jason Kottke points out here, the title sequence for Severance is outstanding. Whilst we won't be making a HBO drama anytime soon, I think they're worth studying. There's a lot to learn from them. Good sequences have a lot of storytelling happening in a short space of time, and in the case of sequences like this from The Morning Show, with minimal graphics.
(1 min read)

Tone Knob: How the Scouts Changed Their Tone of Voic e
Tone Knob is a newsletter that I really look forward to landing in my inbox and this edition is my favourite so far. It looks at how the Scouts changed their tone of voice. There's a lot to love in this, especially this quote on how the change of tone changed the organisation: "When you’re in a hall or a room for a Scout meeting, it’s bubbling over with warmth, kindness, fun and energy – yet often that was missing from the way we communicated. Our language was full of phrases like ‘ensure’, ‘facilitate’, ‘as soon as practicable’ and ‘subject to confirmation’. The tone of voice has helped us be truer to what the Scouts is really like. It’s helped free us."
(6 min read)

Jony Ive on What Focus Really is
A short but focussed clip featuring the Apple designer discussing what he learned from Steve Jobs about focus.
(90 second watch)

A Thread of Fascinating Generation-Defining Stats
In 1994, Jeff Bezos famously spotted a stat that made him leave his high-paying job to start Amazon: The Internet was growing 2300% per year. This thread is full of similar facts and is worth bookmarking as it is constantly updated.
(Thread)

Marketing Unf*cked: Why You Need a Content Audit
When was the last time you did a content audit? If you think you don't need one you need to listen to this. Lauren Pope talks about some of the horrific things that she has surfaced whilst doing content audits for clients. Whilst I'm not a fan of the current trend for dropping the 'F' word into title s, I do like the starting point being that marking is broken followed by some really smart expert advice on how to fix it. I came across this via Lauren's newsletter.
(20 min listen)

Discover MoMA's Modern Art with Each New Browser Tab
I've been using a similar plug-in produced by the Science Museum for years. It was a great way of getting a bit more history into my life. Then I came across this. Now I'm getting lots of really visually pleasing moments throughout the day which is a huge win. It's really good.
(Chrome plug-in)

Hacks For Traveling With Children
This is the best list EVER. Parents. Read, bookmark and remember me when your holiday is saved. Via Kevin Maguire.
(List)

The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book
I enjoyed discovering this via Anna Higgs on Twitter. In 1976 Stan Lee published a book on fitness featuring Marvel characters explaining different aspects of fitness and health. The Human Torch introduces warm-up exercises, Mister Fantastic covers stretching, The Silver Surfer goes over posture and balance, Spider-Man takes on agility and climbing techniques, Sub-Mariner and Ghost Rider take turns with swimming and bicycling, and The Hulk shows basic weightlifting with dumbbells.
(1 min read)

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Thanks for reading and see you all next week,

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the team at Storythings

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Friday, March 25, 2022

View this email and the newsletter archive in your browser 10 stories we've enjoyed this week Illustration of small girl wearing brown trousers and a white shirt flying. She is surrounds by flying

Finding Your Audience, How to Fix Marketing and Unskippable Title Sequences

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