Brilliant Content Marketing, Write Clearly and Superhero Storytelling

Hey all,

Hope you’ve all had a glorious week.

We’re a couple of weeks away from our Beyond the Campaign workshop. If you’re interested in adding long-running formats to your marketing or comms then this is for you. The workshop will be in New York on Tuesday 26th September. It’ll cover understanding and measuring audience attention, developing branded content formats, getting your workflow right, and measuring success. Join us.

If you’re not in New York but would like to hear more about how we help brands with their content strategy and production, just reply to this email. We’d love to show you the many ways we’ve helped our clients become world-class storytellers.

Enjoy this week’s stories and enjoy this late summer sun. Have a fantastic weekend!

Hugh

Three Audience Experiences to Consider For Your Next Video (7 min read)

Why Steven Soderbergh’s Love of Below Deck is So Inspiring (6 min read)

Do You Think More Clearly When Reading or When Listening (8 min read)

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily (9 min read)

The Greatest Piece of Content Marketing Ever! (5 min read)

The Life Cycle of Superhero Storytelling (7 min watch)

The Glamorous Lonely Life of Private Chefs (6 min read)

Beautiful Animated Collages (4 min read)

How Guatemala Built a New City With Community At Its Heart (12 min watch)

The Origin of “You’re twisting my melon, man!” (1 min watch)

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. 

Three Audience Experiences to Consider For Your Next VideoEven though I’m a relative newcomer to Ian Edgar’s Screen Theories Substack I can highly recommend that you subscribe. Especially if you make films or are as obsessed with audience attention as we are. This week he looks at what I now have in my mind as “the 3 Vs of audience experience” and discusses which of the 3Vs goes unheralded: “At the voyeuristic level, you’re understanding through story - essentially, the writer is in charge. At the vicarious level, you’re connecting through character - the actor or the host is primary. At the visceral level, you’re almost feeling it directly - with only the camera and microphone between viewer and action.”

Why Steven Soderbergh’s Love of Below Deck is So InspiringAs an Indian-American woman pursuing a career in entertainment journalism, Kirthana Ramisetti never felt comfortable discussing her love of pop culture for fear of not being taken seriously. However, when she discovered Steven Soderbergh’s media diaries, a joy that we’ve been sharing here for years, it changed her life. Find out how Steven used all those hours he spent watching Below Deck in his work.

Do You Think More Clearly When Reading or When ListeningIf the way a person thinks about incoming information is based only on the content itself, then it should not matter whether they hear or read it. However, in recent experiments, evidence has been found that suggests this does have an impact on how people reason. This could have practical implications for daily life, for example, imagine a judge who reads a legal brief or hears the arguments presented in spoken form. Would the judge evaluate the brief differently depending on how the information is received?

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More EasilyStill on the subject of clarity, this is a great resource that you should bookmark or download. It comes from Alex Morris’ very useful strategy newsletter Strat_Scraps. It’s essential three really well-presented guides in one deck. If you, or someone you know, needs guidance on how to write more clearly, think more clearly, or think about complex issues more clearly, just hand them this.

The Greatest Piece of Content Marketing Ever!The Michelin Guide is one of the most recognisable names in the culinary world. But when it started it was a completely different kind of publication than what it is today. In this Formats Unpacked I take a look at the big lesson you can learn from a piece of content marketing that has been around for 123 years.

The Life Cycle of Superhero StorytellingIn this short video essay, Nerdwriter AKA Evan Puschak, examines the life cycle of superhero storytelling, looking at how the stories go from standalone to stories that crossover and have so much interconnectivity that keeping up can start to feel like homework. Evan suggests that Marvel is in the later stages of this cycle, where casual fans are dropping off because they haven't watched increasingly mediocre movies and full seasons of shows to keep up to date on what's to come.

The Glamorous Lonely Life of Private ChefsIn the restaurant industry, it used to be a career move that was frowned upon but now more cooks are pursuing careers in cooking for wealthy clients. From looking at some of the TikTok accounts out there it’s easy to understand the appeal but the glitz of living on a luxury yacht isn’t always the whole picture.

Beautiful Animated CollagesCollage artist and animator Alice Isaac creates these beautiful animated collages showcasing this year’s Mercury Prize shortlisted artists.

How Guatemala Built a New City With Community At Its HeartI really enjoyed this video on the city of Cayalá in Guatemala. This project by Léon Krier and Estudio Urbano redefines how cities can be, by showing how to put community at its heart and designing it to connect people from all walks of life. I particularly liked how they discourage cars without the use of roadsigns. (via Ashley Pollack)

The Origin of “You’re twisting my melon, man!”I’m honestly flabbergasted to discover the phrase didn’t originally come from the dark and addled mind of Shaun Ryder.

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.