Better Copywriting, Smarter Brainstorms and How to Tell Good Climate Stories

Hey all,

Did you know, we have three different newsletters? If you don’t already, try some of the others.

Also, did you know that we make podcasts and that our work in audio dates back almost 30 years starting with the BBC? If you think a podcast might be the best way to achieve a communication goal, we can help you.

Finally, did you know that collectively the team at Storythings have won multiple Baftas, Webbys and an Emmy? If you want to know how you can improve your storytelling, we can help.

Have a great weekend.

Hugh

How to Get Unstuck Using Visual Frameworks (4 min read)

Playbook: How to Tell Good Climate Stories (Resource)

Six Short Stories on Matching Your Personal Traits to Your Work (4 min read)

How Tinder Made Me a Better Copywriter (8 min read)

Brainstorm Questions Not Ideas (3 min read)

The Scale of the Milky Way (7 min watch)

You’re Probably Recycling Wrong. This Quiz Will Help You Sort it Out (4 min play)

A Love Letter to YouTube (3 min read)

The Illusion of Choice (Posters)

Ikea - Proudly Second Best Campaign (1 min watch)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Bristol, 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. newsletters, podcasts, publications, or video series).3. Production - Do you need help creating and running an existing or new content format, and growing loyal audiences around them?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

How to Get Unstuck Using Visual FrameworksI’ll be sharing this far and wide. You may want to too. It’s a set of incredibly useful visualisations that will help you understand your thoughts. Or in this case, your stuckness. When you are in a stuckness situation, it’s really hard to see the way out. But having a visual is as close to having a map as you will get. You also need these wonderful 100 Visual Frameworks. (4 min read)

Playbook: How to Tell Good Climate StoriesWhat a fantastic resource this is. Good Energy supports TV and film creators in telling wildly entertaining stories that honestly reflect the world we live in now—a world that’s in a climate crisis. The organisation has put together this playbook that includes tips and tricks that can be applied across all forms of storytelling. For example, there are lessons in this piece about how climate heroes don’t have to be saints that can be used to make your climate story feel less earnest or preachy. (resource)

Six Short Stories on Matching Your Personal Traits to Your WorkThe opening story in Billy Oppenheimer’s newsletter instantly caught my attention, as it often does. This week we hear stories from Warren Buffett, Rick Rubin, Josh Waitzkin, and Jim Henson on the theme of leaning into your personal traits to shape your approach to business or creativity.(4 min read)How Tinder Made Me a Better CopywriterHere are seven excellent copywriting lessons from Tinder, including ‘3. Not Everyone Will Love You (and that’s OK)’: “The more you narrow your target, the more you can write something that appeals to the right audience. It’s a good thing if everyone doesn’t love you — that’s called branding. As a former boss said about my work, ‘If no one gets angry, irritated, or provoked by your copy, it’s simply because it’s too boring.’”(8 min read)

Brainstorm Questions Not IdeasErika Hall on how to put an end to the performative nature of brainstorms: “A quick and effective fix is to stop brainstorming ideas with your team, and start brainstorming questions instead. Getting together and listing every question you can think of about a problem, a process, or a situation is uncomfortable at first, and then in very short order enhances collaboration, decreases risk and puts you on the path to being a learning organization.”(3 min read)

The Scale of the Milky WayThis mindblowing video demonstrates the size of the Milky Way using the map of America in a brilliant way. There’s a fantastic bit in the middle that contextualizes the size of the sun on that map which is quite something. (7 min watch)

You’re Probably Recycling Wrong. This Quiz Will Help You Sort it OutIt’s amazing how effective turning a story into a quiz can be in helping your readers or customers retain information. This simple story/game has been more useful than any other guidance I’ve been given via leaflets, packaging or articles. (4 min play)

A Love Letter to YouTubeIt’s been a very good week on Why Is This Interesting? I was quite shocked at how much I undervalued YouTube until I read this. Also in WITI, this on Rimowa and branding is great as is the McLuhan Edition and how much of his work we have consumed through cultural osmosis. (3 min read)The Illusion of ChoiceThese posters for Richard Shotton’s new book The Illusion of Choice are genius!(Thread)

Ikea - Proudly Second Best CampaignAnd this smart and lovely campaign is a great reminder that you don’t always have to be the best. Or perfect, as discussed in the How to Tell Good Climate Stories playbook. Here’s one of the best ‘being second’ campaigns ever.(1 min watch)

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.