25 Greatest Magazine Covers, How The AI Bubble Could Burst, and Is Nike's Brand Reboot Working?

Hello lovely people!

We’ve been running this newsletter for well over a decade now, and so Hugh has been working on a bit of a redesign. Don’t worry, we’ll still give you ten great links every week, but we want to introduce a few simple ways to increase the conversation, as we love hearing from you all. Changing a well established format is hard, so this is a heads-up that things will look slightly different around here soon.

We’re deep in production making editorial, video, podcasts and webinars for our lovely clients right now, and having interesting conversations about our new Content As A Service offering. If this sounds like the kind of thing that can help you, hit the button below:

Here’s ten links of creative inspiration for the weekend. It’s Friday! Tick those last things off your to-do list and give your brain some fun things to look at.

Matt

25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time (15-min read/view)

Is Nike’s Return to Brand Marketing Working? (5-min read)

The Five Automations You Should Set Up For Your Newsletter (7-min read)

Drunk Dads and Straw Men: What Happens When You Don’t Understand Your Audience (8-min read)

This Is How The AI Bubble Could Burst (56-min listen)

How Hawker Signboards Tell The Story of Singapore (Scrollytelling article)

What on Earth is GDELT? (A Google Project, I think?)

A Chilling 80s Video Game About Nuclear War (5-minute read)

How Creative Are You Feeling Right Now? (short poll)

Lovely Voice-Controlled Web Game (A few seconds if you’re as bad as me)

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time (15-min read/view)
I’ve said before that we’re suckers for a good list at Storythings. the NYT got together a panel of experts to choose the 25 best magazine covers, maybe because mags are having a bit of a renaissance right now. I fully expected the classic Sports Illustrated Ali cover to be in there, but hadn’t seen the lovely New Yorker Bert and Ernie cover that I’ve added above.

Is Nike’s Return to Brand Marketing Working? (5-min read)
We’ve covered the story of Nike’s disastrous focus on performance marketing over brand before, so this is a good check in from Digiday to see if the shift back to brand marketing is working. The signs are positive, but it’s still early - when you neglect your brand, it takes years to rebuild it.

The Five Automations You Should Set Up For Your Newsletter (7-min read)
I’ve been diving deep into newsletter strategy for a couple of clients at the moment (btw - if you need help, you should get in touch for a chat) so I loved this article from the excellent Inbox Collective. Automations are very underused by just about all our clients. Set them up right, and you can create an engagement pipeline that works for you!

Drunk Dads and Straw Men: What Happens When You Don’t Understand Your Audience (8-min read)
We don’t work in the sports media sector, but our friend Richard Gillis’ brilliant Unofficial Partner newsletter and podcast is always valuable. In this great essay he starts by talking about the audience behaviour at the Ryder Cup, but turns this into a hugely insightful analysis of what happens when you reduce your audiences to stereotypical personas. Well worth a read (and a subscribe) even if you don’t work in sport.

This Is How The AI Bubble Could Burst (56-min listen)
The world seems split between AI evangelists and AI haters right now, and I thought this podcast with Derek Thompson & Paul Kedrosky would come down on the latter side. But it’s far more insightful and nuanced than that, with great insights into how crazy this current tech investment bubble really is, and how the huge flows of money into AI are starving investments in pretty much every other industrial sector. That can only last for so long.

How Hawker Signboards Tell The Story of Singapore (Scrollytelling article)
I love how vernacular designs develop their own rules and language. This brilliant scrollytelling article from The Straits Times shows how colours, layout and type developed a consistent design language amongst Singapores’ hundreds of food stalls.

What on Earth is GDELT? (A Google Project, I think?)
Anjali posted this in the Storythings Slack, and I clicked on it thinking it would be a ‘world in data’ style site. But its a bit stranger than that - it seems to be archiving decades of news information to try and give a real-time representation of global society. The videos are a bit off, and the guy leading it looks like the kind of character you’d invent for an Alternate Reality Game. So this is either a strange fringe google project, or stealth marketing for a new film franchise. I think it’s the former, but would love it to be the latter!

A Chilling 80s Video Game About Nuclear War (5-minute read)
This week I wrote an edition of Why Is This Interesting? about Theatre Europe, an 1980s video game I played as a kid about the threat of global nuclear war. The game taught me about the role of escalation in nuclear warfare, and had a truly chilling game mechanic that I’d love to see come back in modern games.

How Creative Are You Feeling Right Now? (short poll)
Our friend John Peabody from Aspen Institute is running a quick poll on his excellent NESS newsletter to find out how creative we’re feeling despite [gestures with hands] all this going on around us. It will take you a couple of minutes, and I’m really eager to see the results.

Lovely Voice-Controlled Web Game (A few seconds if you’re as bad as me)
This is a really fun little game from Hyundai’s Artlab, the kind of experimental branded content I really love to see. Use your voice and other noises to raise your balloon in a ‘flappy bird’ style retro scroller. Probably not one to play in an open office, but lots of fun!

Thanks again to everyone who gets in touch about the newsletter - we love hearing from you! I’d like some recommendations for good newsletters I could subscribe to - I mentioned Inbox Collective and Unofficial Partner above - what is your favourite newsletter right now?

See you next week!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings