Hi there!

As creative storytellers, we know what it's like to have ideas in your head (or in the cloud) for days, weeks, months and sometimes, years. We love making things and believe great ideas shouldn't sit around; they should get made. This week, we released FOUR audio prototypes, created by Hugh Garry and our in-house Audio Producer, Chris Mitchell, as the first examples of how we can work with our clients and partners to demonstrate ideas, test how they connect with audiences and establish the workflows.

Our prototypes are like your favourite musician's demo tape. They aren't the all-singing final form of gloss and glory, but an exciting glimpse of what a fully formed production could be. Listen to:

Don't Snooze On Wrestling
A daily nine-minute slobber knocker of Pro Wrestling hot takes! Comedian Sikisa lays the smackdown on all the hard-hitting wrestling shenanigans in just nine minutes - because that’s the amount of time between you hitting snooze and having to get out of bed.

How The World Changed In 90 Days
Looking at world history through a three-month window. A journey back to early 2008, which some fans call the golden era of modern television - three seminal TV shows (Breaking Bad, Lost, and The Wire) aired simultaneously and converged at the start, peak, and end of their greatness—all within 90 days.

There's No Such Thing As A Bad Idea
Celebrating major success through epic failures. A retrospective look at when U2 partnered with Apple to release their version of the iPod, which didn't connect with music and tech lovers.

Last-Minute Game Changers
An eleventh-hour trip down the what-if rabbit hole. The dramatic history of SMS, better known as text messaging and how it brought the whole world together.

We’re also chatting to some really interesting potential clients about making prototypes for them. Drop us a line if that sounds interesting!

Anjali

Do Whatever A ‘Real Brand’ Could Never Do (1-min read)

Aperture: Merging AI, Physical Design and Digital Wellbeing Principles For Mindful Technology Use (2-min watch)

How A Filmmaker and A Crooked Lawyer Shattered Denmark’s Self-Image (31-min read)

Pulp’s Music Video For Spike Island Is AI-Generated (5-min watch)

TikTok’s Hottest Show The Group Chat Thrives Because Of The Gossip (4-min read)

How Prototyping Makes Your B2B Marketing Better (3-min read)

9 Rules For New Technology (8-min read)

Say Hello To The WWE-ification of Marketing (26-page LinkedIn PDF)

What Happens When We Treat The Past As A Stock Library (14-min read)

‘Views’ Are Lies (7-min read)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

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.

Do Whatever A ‘Real Brand’ Could Never Do (1-min read)
This is simple but sensible advice from Elliot Aronow, and what we encourage our B2B clients in particular to do. HT friend of Storythings Steve Bryant.

Aperture: Merging AI, Physical Design and Digital Wellbeing Principles For Mindful Technology Use (2-min watch)
From designer Clara Gaggero Westaway and magician Adrian Westaway’s studio Special Projects, Aperture is an experiment in making us use technology in a more considered way. Simply flip your phone around in its case, such that only a small portion of it is visible, and Aperture gives you the basic essentials of what you need to know, and nothing more.

How A Filmmaker and A Crooked Lawyer Shattered Denmark’s Self-Image (31-min read)
This is a proper potboiler if there ever was one. It reminded me a lot of Phoenixed, the investigative podcast we made for the Global Payroll Association (which was just announced as a Webby Honoree!). In Denmark, the documentary The Black Swan follows a business lawyer who is also a criminal as she exposes motorcycle gangs, politicians, entrepreneurs, and real estate barons, amongst others, through hidden cameras.

Pulp’s Music Video For Spike Island Is AI-Generated (5-min watch)
Jarvis Cocker spoke at one of the last The Story conferences that we organised at Storythings. We’ve always been fans of Pulp in any case, so it was interesting to hear the news of their latest music album, More, with their first single in nearly 24 years, Spike Island. Cocker used AI to create the video for Spike Island, which features the cardboard cut-out figures who appear on the cover of Pulp's biggest album, Different Class. Thankfully, through the process of using AI and generating prompts to create the video, he'd landed firmly on the side of "human intelligence" over AI.

TikTok’s Hottest Show The Group Chat Thrives Because Of The Gossip (4-min read)
It was earlier in the week that I first heard about The Group Chat, and promptly watched the quick TikTok series by influencer Sydney Robinson who writes and stars in each video - which is about a group text between a few girls. Since then, the show has amassed millions of fans, including singer-songwriter Charlie Puth, who makes a cameo appearance on one episode. As The Fader says, “An accurate comparison for The Group Chat isn’t The White Lotus or Severance, but the Am I The Asshole? subreddit or popular podcast Normal Gossip, places where you get to eavesdrop on other people’s problems. Robinson knows it, too. “It’s just an addictive thing to watch, like reality TV,” she said in that same interview. “When the tea is piping hot, it’s piping hot.”"

How Prototyping Makes Your B2B Marketing Better (3-min read)
Matt is going to kick off a new series on our Attention Matters newsletter soon, and in preparation we would love it if those of you who work on commissioning B2B work, or in B2B content in any form, answered 3 quick questions.

9 Rules For New Technology (8-min read)
Ted Gioia recalls Wendell Berry’s list of reasonable requirements for new technology from 1987, and applies them to our times. As he says, today’s tech leaders would get failing grades.

Say Hello To The WWE-ification of Marketing (26-page LinkedIn PDF)
This clearly seems to have struck a nerve with marketers: Joe Burns talks about how ad land is becoming more like pro wrestling (maybe listen to Don’t Snooze On…Wrestling while you read this!). Jokes apart, sometimes I do personally think the showmanship on LinkedIn is exhausting, but as Burns says, ‘When ChatGPT is writing slides, vitality is the one thing that can’t be replicated.’ The debate continues. 

What Happens When We Treat The Past As A Stock Library (14-min read)
Thanks again to Steve Bryant, who shared this thoughtful take by Elizabeth Goodspeed on copyright law, corporate rights when it comes to training LLM’s, and public domain illustrations amongst others: “If I’ve learned anything in this time, it’s that working with archival content – public domain or not – takes precision, intention, and care.”

‘Views’ Are Lies (7-min read)
We can’t bang this drum enough, so we’re thrilled to see David Pierce bang it on our behalf in The Verge. This is a reminder that numbers mean very little on the internet today. We knew this, but for those of us working in marketing, advertising, or branding, it’s always worth a reminder to stay grounded: “We’ve been doing this whole internet thing for a while now, and it’s pretty clear that just about all the metrics are bad. They’ve turned the internet into a game to be won, a system to be gamed, a race to the biggest numbers even when the numbers don’t mean anything. Maybe we’d all be better off without the numbers, but they’re not going anywhere. So all we can do is remember: “views” are not views. Views are lies.”

We’ve had a particularly decent spell of sun lately here in the south of the UK, so hopefully it’s good wherever you are too. Take the time to go out in the sun, look up, close your eyes, hear the birds chirp and let your mind slow down.

Oh, and please share this newsletter far and wide, and make yourself known as the person in the know because of everything we share in this newsletter!

See you next week!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

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