Welcome to your weekend!

We’re just about to hit the dog days of August, when I hope many of you will be getting a break and going somewhere nice on holiday. Send me a pic of your favourite meal/foodstuff from your holiday - I’m a sucker for food pics.

💻 DATA POINT: The 2026 OFCOM Media Nations report is the most comprehensive and authoritative survey of UK media audience trends. I’ve included the link below, but the graph below is something I come back to every year - the average daily minutes watching video. We watch over 4 hrs 23 mins of video a day in the UK - just a few years ago, Live TV was over 50% of that. Now, it’s only 34%.

OFCOM 2026 Media Nations Report (big report)

What it Looks Like When Claude Writes Your Resume (5-min read)

A Timeline For The Future (scrolling timeline)

How Pleats Are Made for High Fashion (6-min read)

The Most Important Trainer You’ve Never Heard Of (8-min read)

The B2B Blog Is Collapsing (4-min read)

The New Brand Folklore (5-min read)

What Will More Intelligence Actually Do For Us? (10-min read)

Insane Mountain Bike Assault Course Built On Water (3-min watch)

📣 New Format For our Futures In Draft Newsletter (8-min read) 📣

OFCOM 2026 Media Nations Report (big report)
I mentioned the stat that we watch, on average, around 4.5 hours of video a day in the UK. But the generational split is really important - 16-24s watch the least (around 3hrs) whilst 75+ watch over twice as much - 6.5hrs. Audio is also getting stronger - 93% of UK adults listened to live radio at least weekly, and 27% listen to podcasts. Our media habits only continue to get more and more complex.

What it Looks Like When Claude Writes Your Resume (5-min read)
This is great from Alex at STRATSCRAPS. After building an archive of newsletters and work in Claude, he asked the AI to write a warts-and-all recommendation letter for him. It’s actually a good use of AI, as it doesn’t hold back, and strangely feels more authentic for it.

A Timeline For The Future (scrolling timeline)
Anjali shared this fun visualisation of a very diverse selection of crowd-sourced predictions on the Manifold Markets site. Amongst the usual industry and political predictions are more vague, personal questions like ‘When Will I Be With Her?”

How Pleats Are Made for High Fashion (6-min read)
This is from the brilliant Inconspicuous Consumption newsletter I recommended last week. It’s a factory tour of Tom’s Sons International Pleating, an historic NYC fabric manufacturer specialising in pleating fabric for high-fashion customers. I didn’t know they were produced using complex cardboard moulds!

The Most Important Trainer You’ve Never Heard Of (8-min read)
Another great rabbit-hole read - Ed Conway tells the story of the One Line, a trainer made by an emerging sportswear manufacturer in the US in 1980. I won’t spoil the story, but that trainer ended up changing global trade in ways we are still feeling today.

The B2B Blog Is Collapsing (4-min read)
I’m posting this mainly because I wish we’d written it, as it’s exactly what we say and do for our B2B clients - in a world of Google Zero, you need to move from running one off content projects to becoming a publisher: “Rather than creating content designed to intercept search queries, a brand becomes the news source for its industry, with original reporting, interviews with the exact practitioners it wants to reach, and fast commentary on the stories that matter to that community.”

The New Brand Folklore (5-min read)
Linked to the above, this great post on the BRXND newsletter reimagines the folklore that ‘your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room’ for a world in which it’s not just people, but AI agents, that are re-telling your story. So the goal for your brand is to have a story worth re-telling, which reminds me a lot of Henry Jenkins’ hugely influential work on fan culture - If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.

What Will More Intelligence Actually Do For Us? (10-min read)
This has been shared a lot this week, and its a long read, but worth your attention. Noah Smith twists the conversation about AI to think not about how it might replace human intelligence, but whether there is a new kind of ‘cloud intelligence’ that we’ve never been able to access before.

Insane Mountain Bike Assault Course Built On Water (3-min watch)
Danny McAskill doing what Danny McAskill does - riding a mountain bike over a water-based stunt course with insane levels of skill and balance. I watched the first few seconds of this thinking I’d love to give it a try, and then realised I’d not even make it off the first platform.

📣 New Format For our Futures In Draft Newsletter (8-min read) 📣
Futures In Draft, our editorial project for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, are testing a new format for their newsletter, including a detailed Q&A with a leading light in the emerging futures community about their cultural influences. The first Q&A is from South Asian artist, poet and organiser, Maria Thomas.

Friend of Storythings Ronnie Higgins (hire him!) posted this great thoughtpiece on LinkedIn, wondering what would have happened if the Internet ate broadcasting instead of publishing back in the 2000s. I love they way he builds out his thought experiment to think how B2B marketing would change if the focus was the audience’s behaviour, not the content element. This is what we do with our B2B clients all the time!

READ RONNIE’S POST HERE>

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team