Happy Friday everyone!

In London, the weather feels like it’s finally spring, which is lovely - long may it continue. Of course, it could also just be Fool’s Spring or the Spring of Deception, in which case don’t quote me!

This week, we’ve been busy finishing off an important piece of audience research for Art UK and launching the latest episode of Payroll Around The World for ADP, which looks at the intricacies of payroll in Italy. Last week the latest episode of the podcast we work on for the Jacobs Foundation and BOLD, Teachers’ Voices, was also released, which looks at how teachers can inspire students to become leaders. Give both a listen!

We’re running a workshop for a finance-related B2B client soon about audience attention and format development in the B2B space. If you’d like us to come and run one for you, give us a shout!

On to the links, and have a great weekend.

Anjali

How Adolescence Became The Most Talked About Show Of The Year (30-minute watch/listen)

Cosmos: A Discovery Engine For Creatives (website)

The Bathysphere: A Video Games Newsletter That Isn’t About Video Game News (10-minute read)

Why Following Fixations Makes Our Creative Work Better (14-minute read)

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling Adapted For UX (11-minute read)

Some B2B Marketers Are Banking On Their Own Employees Being Creators (6-minute read)

Wallpaper’s New Video Series: The Stuff That Surrounds (10-minute watch)

The Russo Brothers’ Fundamental Storytelling Weaknesses (3-minute read)

On Hyperlegibility, or Extraordinary Readability (14-minute read)

The Madmen And The AIs (2-minute 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.

How Adolescence Became The Most Talked About Show Of The Year (30-minute watch/listen)
Matt shared this in our Proper Fancy creative show-and-tell this week: an episode of The Rest Is Entertainment where they dig into what makes Netflix’s Adolescence so great. I will say that after trying desperately to avoid reading anything about it, I found that an impossible task this week, so I am finally watching it. And concurrently watching this episode linked to above was fantastic; as we discussed at Proper Fancy, the craft and thinking that went into shooting the drone shot at the end of episode 2 was brilliant. (Maybe next week we’ll end our obsession with Adolescence. Maybe.)

Cosmos: A Discovery Engine For Creatives (website)
Hugh’s been using this lately. He says, “It’s a bit like Pinterest without all the ads and Arena with a better interface. It feels like the recommendations algorithm is as good as Pinterest but there are a lot more serious creatives using it.” The images do look really lovely, if you’re looking for a particular type of inspiration.

The Bathysphere: A Video Games Newsletter That Isn’t About Video Game News (10-minute read)
This is a neat new newsletter that is about “games we’ve played or games we’re looking forward to, and about books, films and events that might be interesting to people who enjoy thinking about games and what they mean.” The first edition is about how characters rest in games, which in itself is a beautiful consideration: “It makes the world richer because you slow down and stop and look at specific aspects of the world around you - it's the difference between a photograph and a scrolling TikTok feed, say - and it makes the world richer because you can't help but imagine all the other places you might stop and rest.”

Why Following Fixations Makes Our Creative Work Better (14-minute read)
A well-written piece looking at why many great creatives are motivated by obsessions, and how obsessions help shape identity. This makes all the more sense in light of the stat that 20-50% of the creative industry is neurodiverse, which means obsessions are channelled into creative projects, such as Rose Pilkington’s work on 3D illustration and motion, Alice Poyzer on Other Joys as a way of expressing her love for animals, and Lorna Allan and Jhinuk Sarkar’s podcast Square Hole, which came about as a result of their late diagnoses as neurodiverse creatives.

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling Adapted For UX (11-minute read)
An oldie but goodie. Experience designer Valeria Spirovski reimagined Pixar’s rules of storytelling and applied it to the field of user experience. These philosophies apply to our own take on format prototyping at Storythings: do not get wedded to a format, and always look for feedback from users to make it better. “It can be exciting when you’re in Photoshop fueled by the latest new interfaces you’ve seen by designing the most beautiful and exciting feature set ever created. But we know this isn’t always what excites our users or makes them happy. Keep your users in focus before you start designing — otherwise you’ll get carried away and fall into the trap of being attached to something you’ve invested too much time in.”

Some B2B Marketers Are Banking On Their Own Employees Being Creators (6-minute read)
B2B creator panels were all the rage at SXSW in March, and this piece looks at this new trend, where some brands are seeing more engagement with employee-created content than brand-led ones. Apparently the top-performing C-suite executives have a 6.2% engagement rate with their LinkedIn posts, compared to 1-2% by typical users. This also ties in with the rise of LinkedIn ghostwriters, which are another emerging breed of business.

Wallpaper’s New Video Series: The Stuff That Surrounds (10-minute watch)
Wallpaper Magazine has a beautiful new video format that’s just launched, which understands creative people through the lens of the things they surround themselves with. Episode 1 of The Stuff That Surrounds goes into the home and studio of Creative Director Veronica Ditting. Ditting was at The Gentlewoman magazine for 12 years, and has won multiple awards for her work with brands like Hermès, The Row, Louis Vuitton and Pirelli. The video is a wonderful look at her creative inspiration, how the green Pirelli rubber floor in her apartment contrasts with the Barbican’s Brutalist grey, and how she manifests her love of things like printed magazines and glass. Love.

The Russo Brothers’ Fundamental Storytelling Weaknesses (3-minute read)
In this thread on X (yes, X - I apologise in advance), a critic goes into the storytelling failures in the recently released 2025 film The Electric State from the Russo Brothers, also the directors of Avengers: Endgame. At Storythings, we always talk about the importance of taking the time to make people care. Showcasing something you did is great for you - but why would the audience care? And it looks like that’s what the Russo Brothers have fallen foul of: “It's always rushed through jumping too far ahead before effectively establishing characters, emotional connections, and motivations.”

On Hyperlegibility, or Extraordinary Readability (14-minute read)
Again right up our street, given its focus on modern attention, Packy McCormick writes on the concept of hyperlegibility, or how information today is so available, thanks to AI, that even complex, hard-to-explain or hard-to-find concepts can be summarised or found at the click of a ChatGPT button. He also talks about what that does to both our content production inclinations and our attention: “You could opt out, stop publishing, encrypt yourself. Someone else will happily fill the vacuum. Attention is the scarce resource. Information you can get. Information, long alpha, becomes beta.”

The Madmen And The AIs (2-minute read)
Two researchers at MIT paired AIs with humans to generate a whopping 11,138 ads for a think tank. They manipulated the personality traits for each AI and then matched them with a human who had the corresponding trait. The results were amusing! “For example, a neurotic AI tended to make a lot more copy edits unless paired with an agreeable human”, and “Similarly, if a highly conscientiousness AI and a highly conscientiousness human were paired together they exchanged a lot more messages.”

Right, fingers down and laptop closed - have a wonderful weekend. We’d totally appreciate it if you shared this newsletter with your near and dear ones. We’d love it even more if you introduced us to someone we could do some brilliant work with. Don’t be shy.

See you next week,

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

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