Hey all,

A quick reminder that we’re hiring! We’re looking for a project manager to join our team. The role is full-time and at least two days per week will be in our central Brighton office. If you understand creative processes and have good experience in supporting creative teams deliver their best work, we’d love to hear from you.

That’s all from us. Next week will be a bumper end-of-the-year newsletter that you don’t want to miss. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s stories and have the best weekend.

Hugh

2024: The Year to Prioritise Audience Needs (6-min read)

One of the Most Audacious Pranks in History Was Hidden Within a Hit TV Show (15-min read)

A Lovely Video About Imposter Syndrome (2-min watch)

How a 1939 Marketing Gimmick Launched a Beloved Christmas Character (5-min read)

What I Wish I’d Known Before Launching My Newsletter (10-min read)

7 Thoughts on Ritual (7-min read)

The AI Trust Crisis (5-min read)

The Spokes of Success (7-min read)

Everything Isn’t Terrible (1-min read)

Google’s 25 Years of Search (4-min watch)

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. 

2024: The Year to Prioritise Audience Needs (6-min read)If you’re looking for publishing predictions for the year ahead I can highly recommend taking 6 minutes to read this from Sarah Marshall, head of audience development across all of Conde Nast’s publications. Sarah begins with a rundown of everything that has happened with social over the past 12 months resulting in the discovery crisis we wrote about in our Broken series. She then moves on to what you need to be aware of in 2024.

One of the Most Audacious Pranks in History Was Hidden Within a Hit TV Show (15-min read)This is a great read for the weekend. Across two seasons, over 100 abortion activism, anti-gun propaganda, and HIV awareness messages were all smuggled onto prime time TV show Melrose Place via specially created props. They came in all shapes and sizes including art hung on walls, bedsheets and this: “‘Food for Thought’, one of GALA’s most audacious pieces, hid in the most mundane place: Chinese takeout bags. Envisioning Melrose Place’s future syndication around the world, Chin realized that GALA’s work “did not have to be limited to English. A billion people read Chinese.” One takeout bag sported the ideogram for human rights alongside the one for turmoil, the euphemistic term used by the government during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Another read “Stolen artifacts, national treasure,” a reference to colonial looting.”

A Lovely Video About Imposter Syndrome (2-min watch)One of my favourite new newsletter subscriptions this year has been Video Yes Please. One piece of advice we give to clients who want to make ‘content’ is to ‘make something useful’. Or as our friend John Wiltshire would say ‘Making things people want > Making people want things.” By scouring the internet for interesting, joyful, unorthodox and creative videos made for organisations, Rob Alderson makes my job a lot easier. If you suffer from imposter syndrome then you should watch this.

How a 1939 Marketing Gimmick Launched a Beloved Christmas Character (5-min read)Origin stories like this can often taint our feelings towards beloved Christmas characters but in amongst this marketing story is a bit of twist that will leave you feeling better about our favourite reindeer.

What I Wish I’d Known Before Launching My Newsletter (10-min read)Dan Oshinsky from the brilliant Inbox Collective newsletter asked his readers what advice they wish they’d been given before launching their own. He then shared the best 20 responses. I like this about the difference one newsletter writer found switching from social to newsletters: “The growth is more likely to be slow and steady, but a small list of subscribers who are actually engaged with your product can be so much more valuable than a social handle with a large, passive following, where ultimately who sees your content is in your control. In short, don’t be frustrated if your growth is slow — consistency is key, and your list doesn’t need to be huge to be monetizable. It just needs to be healthy.”

7 Thoughts on Ritual (7-min read)I’m one of those people that can turn the simplest of things into an unbreakable ritual. I bring it into work too which probably explains part of our obsession with formats. We think a lot about what makes people come back time and time again, what builds community and how you build something for growth. Both rituals and formats have these features baked in. Enjoy these seven features and consider how you can bring some of this thinking into your content production. I found this via Alex Morris’s .

The AI Trust Crisis (5-min read)An interesting read on how Dropbox dropped a bunch of new AI tools recently, as many companies like them are doing at the moment. All good for efficiency, however, there wasn’t much clarity around why they were sending your data to OpenAI when you used those features. It turns out the option to do this was defaulted to ‘on’. Despite denials from Dropbox, users believe their data is being used as training data. As the article points out, people still believe that Facebook are using the microphones in phones to listen to your conversations despite a lot of good reasons why they wouldn’t. So do companies like OpenAI have a trust crisis?

The Spokes of Success (7-min read)Another of my favourite newsletter subscriptions this year is Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at 6. Every week he tells six different stories on a theme. This week the theme is spokes of success and features stories from Adele, Tom Hanks and Morgan Housel. It’s always a great read so do subscribe.

Everything Isn’t Terrible (7-min read)I wasn’t aware of Brad Montague’s work until I stumbled upon it via Swiss Miss. Now I want to buy every card, every poster, in fact everything on it.

Google’s 25 Years of Search (4-min watch)And finally, around this time of the year Google publish their Year in Search video. This year they mark 25 years of Google with this round up of some of the most searched in multiple categories. It’s pretty epic.

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.