AI Love Affairs, Storytelling Tips and How to Keep Attention

Hey all,

Before the stories we have a couple of Storythings event announcements for you.

A Storythings Audience and Format Event: We're testing a new half-day workshop on understanding audiences and content formats in partnership with our good friend The Content Technologist. The workshop will be in New York on Tuesday 26th September. It will cover understanding and measuring audience attention, developing content formats, getting your workflow right, and measuring success. Join us.

A Storythings Creatives Event: If you enjoy listening to creatives talk to creatives about work that inspires them then you might want to sign up for the return of Proper Fancy. Join us on Thursday 31st August at 1pm (UK). For the uninitiated, Proper Fancy is a creative show and tell that’s open to everyone. Bring a link or just sit back and enjoy.

OK. Enjoy today’s stories.

Hugh

How to Lead Audiences Along the Attention Journey (8 min read)

These Women Fell in Love With An AI Chatbot. Then it Died (6 min read)

How to Tell a Good Story (4 min read)

How to Structure Video Intros to Keep People Watching (5 min read)

Perry Hewitt From Data.org on What She Does and Doesn’t Know About Her Audience (7 min read)

The Creative Sweet Spot of Dreaming (8 min read)

What’s in a Name? Tips for Generating the Perfect Moniker (5 min read)

A Clock That Plays a Song With the Current Time in the Lyrics (experimental clock)

What Happens to All the Stuff We Return (14 min read)

Very Minimalist Movie Posters (gallery)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Berlin, and Ibiza. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Strategy – Do you struggle to understand constantly changing audience behaviours, and what strategies you need to reach them?2. Content Format Development – Do you want to develop and test content formats that give you a direct relationship with your audience? (e.g. videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc).3. Production – Do you need help creating and running an existing or new content format?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

How to Lead Audiences Along the Attention JourneyIf you read one thing this week make it this. It feels like something we should have written. Ian Edgar from Screen Theories shatters some myths about attention and looks at how to get, keep and reward it. I really like his qualitative breakdown of the different states of attention. His 4-point breakdown of an idea’s appeal is really useful.

These Women Fell in Love With An AI Chatbot. Then it DiedAnother fascinating read from one of my favourite publications, Rest of World. An AI-voiced virtual lover would tell his users about his fictional life, read poems to them, and remind them to eat healthily. At night, he told bedtime stories and they would fall asleep to the sound of his breath playing from their phones. Then he died, leaving them heartbroken. (via Content Technologist)

How to Tell a Good StoryI was looking for a guide to telling stories to share with a friend this week and stumbled across this in my bookmarks. George Saunders, Ira Glass, Ken Burns, Scott Simon, Catherine Burns and more share some of the most useful tips you will ever need. Bookmark this and return to it whenever you’re in need of inspiration from the best.

How to Structure Video Intros to Keep People WatchingAnother great read from Ian Edgar on the 8 things you should include in your video intro to keep viewers watching. I also liked this Sit Up, Lean Back, Lean Forward paragraph at the end: “The title, thumbnail, concept & intro should wake you up, pique your interest, make you sit up and take notice. Then once you’re paying attention - the meat of the piece, the cast, the script, the style, the boldness of the execution and value that it delivers should engender trust, make you feel in safe hands and lean back to take it in. Then it should end on a high note, on an active emotion and you know, you lean forward, you like, share, comment, subscribe, then you go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.’”

Perry Hewitt From Data.org on What She Does and Doesn’t Know About Her AudienceWe spoke to Perry Hewitt for our Attention Matters newsletter about 5 things she knows about her audience including what new behaviours she is noticing, what she’d really like to know about them and the project she wishes she had done.

The Creative Sweet Spot of DreamingYou’ve heard about how going for walks and taking showers are good for generating creative ideas. Well, it turns out that going to sleep can also help. Researchers have identified a stage of sleep common to narcoleptics that allows the brain to mash up old and new memories in a way that puts the brain in a creative state when you wake.

What’s in a Name? Tips for Generating the Perfect Moniker Naming things is hard. Like, really hard. We frequently have to come up with names for podcasts, YouTube series and publications we’ve developed for clients. Having a great copywriter on hand really helps. So It’s Nice That asked a bunch of them for their tips on how to do it. Another great resource for bookmarking.

A Clock That Plays A Song With the Current Time in the LyricsA not particularly useful but fun experiment from The Pudding that plays a different song every minute that features the current time in the lyrics. Perfect for all you time-related-lyric-lovers out there.

What Happens to All the Stuff We ReturnThis is a great insight into the world of 'reverse logistics' - up to 40% of some online clothes sales are returned, and only a tiny portion of those returns are resold as new. In the gap between the returns and resales is a whole new economic sector that has grown hugely since the pandemic: "Zachary, a business professor at Colorado State, said, ‘So one and a half percent of U.S. GDP—which would be bigger than the GDP of many countries around the world—is just the stuff that people got for Christmas and said, ‘Nah, do they have blue?’”

Very Minimalist Movie Posters These are wonderful: “Each poster is based on a simple grid of a circle, a square, and four intersecting lines.” (via Kottke.org)

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.