Clever Ads, Useful Questions, and Tips For Better Storytelling

Hey all,

Do you want to meet super-talented and creative people, discover what’s getting their attention, and maybe even share a link you’re currently obsessing over? Then join us for Proper Fancy next Thursday at 1 pm (BST).

Proper Fancy is a Storythings show-and-tell call that everyone is invited to. We thought it would be nice to invite freelancers to co-host as a way of introducing you all to each other (and potentially opening up work opportunities).

On Thursday, copywriter and marketing consultant Samantha Collier will be joining me as co-host to chat about the things that gave her little brain tingles this month. Sign up here and we’ll send you a Zoom link during the week. Let me know if you’d like to co-host in the future.

Have a great Barbenheimer weekend.

Hugh

Matt Locke on the Six Spaces of Social Media (14 min watch)

Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books (8 min read)

From Shakespeare to Harry Styles: Have Audiences Always Been Rowdy? (5 min read)

5 Things About My Audience (4 min read)

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s 3 Rules For Life (5 min read)

How Avatar Concerts Like Abba Voyage Create Connection (4 min read)

10 Psychology Tricks to Make You A Better Storyteller (visual Twitter thread)

Beautiful Children’s Shadow Show (1 min watch)

22 Questions to Use When Interviewing An Expert (4 min read)

Possibly One of the Smartest Sports Adverts Ever (2 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. 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. 

Matt Locke on the Six Spaces of Social MediaOur very own Matt Locke spoke at the Readmagine ’23 conference in Madrid earlier this year. He revisited an old blog post he wrote about his theory on the six spaces of social media and presented the results of our Scroll Stoppers research on new audience behaviours. (14 min watch)

Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s BooksAn important read on how optimising children’s books for the adult is extracting all the darkness, silliness, and weirdness out of their books: “People in publishing often talk about ‘child-friendly’ books, which suggests something consoling, sweet and kind of nostalgic. But that’s a smokescreen, because those qualities attract parents and teachers more than children…Children like sweet and safe stories but they also like dark, bleak, unsettling or horrible stories. Children are like everyone else, they want stories that reflect the whole contradictory tangle of their lives.”(8 min read)From Shakespeare to Harry Styles: Have Audiences Always Been Rowdy?There has been a fair bit of press attention recently around audiences misbehaving, from throwing phones at artists on stage to fighting in the aisles of theatre productions. Rowdy audiences aren’t new though. As this piece points out, history points to deeper reasons for this: “Pretty much every time society goes through a big period of unrest, that unrest starts to ferment and explode in live performance first. Audiences are a kind of canary in the coal mine for much bigger frustrations and divisions starting to bubble over.”(5 min read)

5 Things About My AudienceI make no apologies for saying how much I’m enjoying this interview series we’re doing over on one of our other newsletters, Attention Matters. In each newsletter, we speak to people working in communications for various organisations about what they know about their audience. This week, Riham Mustafa from International Finance Corporation talks about who her audience is, how she measures engagement, and the changes in audience behaviour she has seen recently. (4 min read)

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s 3 Rules For LifeAs husband and wife, the two musicians had 3 simple rules to live by. Find out what they are and what Laurie’s favourite Lou Reed song is. (5 min read)

How Avatar Concerts Like Abba Voyage Create ConnectionStill on the subject of audiences, nobody threw phones at Benny or Bjorn when I went to see Abba Voyage earlier this year. It was such a brilliant experience that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days after. The point I kept making to people was that I had prepared myself for it being all about the avatars but once the concert began I realised it was so much more. As this piece in The Conversation points out, experiences of identity and meaning in a musical setting like this are co-created by all of its participants, including the audience. The venue itself also plays a major role. (4 min read)

10 Psychology Tricks to Make You A Better StorytellerA lot of great storytelling advice in just 10 tweets. (visual Twitter thread)

Beautiful Children’s Shadow ShowI really want to see this. Chasing Stars in Shadow is an immersive story about shadow kids who come and go between 2D and 3D. The viewer’s light controls the shadows which move around the room and call the viewer to follow. (1 min watch)22 Questions to Use When Interviewing An ExpertHere’s a handy starting point for any content creators interviewing experts or specialists. Experts aren’t always gifted storytellers, so start with a solid list of questions like this and build on it with each interview. Great formats are often designed around a single question such as Which 8 records would you bring to a desert island? or Where are you going? The single-question approach is great for giving your interview format clarity. The audience knows instantly what differentiates this format from other interview formats. The secret behind single-question formats is they are always supported by follow-up questions that help turn your interviewee into a storyteller. I found this on the excellent Content Technologist newsletter. (4 min read)

Possibly One of the Smartest Sports Adverts EverYou don’t have to be a sports fan to recognise the genius is this creative. Well done to all involved! Oh yes. Watch to the end. (2 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.