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Hello!

It’s my turn to curate the links this week, just a few days before Anjali and I head off to give our workshop at SXSW in Austin. It’s my first time there, so if you’re going to be at SXSW and want to grab a coffee and say hi, hit reply to this email and we’ll try and meet up!

In this week’s Attention Matters newsletter, I unpicked the crucial differences between templates (bad) and formats (good). So if you’re suffering from Template Dependence Disorder, subscribe to Attention Matters, or even better, hit the button below and we could do a workshop for you and your team. Once we’re back from SXSW, of course.

Right then - I’ve got a workshop to prepare, a suitcase to pack, and a lot of research on the best Austin BBQ joints to do before I go. Let’s crack on and share 10 creative links to send you into the weekend.

Matt

Eric Kogan’s Incredible Photos Capturing ‘Decisive Moments’ (photo portfolio)

What Lush Learnt From Three Years of Being Mostly Offline (5-min read)

How 12 Americans See Life After Watching a Lot of TikTok (10-min interactive essay)

Showtime! Why Every Brand Needs A Show (7-minute read)

Want To Tell Better Stories? The Secret is Story Finding (5-min read)

The 2025 Recess Creative Playbook (huge resource of creative tips and tricks)

Patreon’s State of Create Report (15-min interactive read)

Who Knows Who’s Watching What on TV? (6-minute read)

Stephen Johnson on ‘Condensing The Iceberg’ (8-minute read)

Roberta Flack’s Tryin’ Times (4-minute video)

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Eric Kogan’s incredible photos capturing ‘decisive moments’ (photo portfolio)
Henri Cartier-Bresson described the art of photography as waiting to capture ‘the decisive moment’ - the split second when events and objects create an extraordinary fleeting image that only a camera could capture. Eric Kogan’s photography takes this idea a step further, capturing the chance intersection of objects that suggest another reality.

What Lush Learnt From Three Years of Being Mostly Offline (5-min read)
Really interesting interview with Jack Constantine, Head of Digital at Lush, about how they stopped buying ads on most of the social platforms: “What brands don’t understand is they are giving the platforms power by being on them. If all the big players stop spending on ads and detach from social, you’d have a massively different environment.”

How 12 Americans See Life After Watching a Lot of TikTok (10-min interactive essay)
We always encourage our clients to use reported speech and dialogue in complex stories, rather than exposition. This scrollytelling piece from the NYT is a great example - rather than another opinion writer’s thoughts on TikTok and the US government ban, why not hear from people that actually use it instead?

Showtime! Why Every Brand Needs A Show (7-minute read)
John Peabody is the Head of Digital at The Aspen Institute, and this is a great, practical breakdown of what he’s learnt creating compelling serial formats. It’s so good, I wish we’d written it ourselves.

Want To Tell Better Stories? The Secret is Story Finding (5-min read)
But we did write this! Our friends at The Communications Network, the US-based network for people working in non-profit comms, asked us to write a summary of our recent Attention Matters series on Story Finding. Some of this might be in our SXSW workshop as well…

The 2025 Recess Creative Playbook (huge resources of creative tips and tricks)
Hugh shared this on Slack and again in our monthly Proper Fancy show and tell last Thursday. It’s an incredible resource - one of those rare cases when it’s worth giving them your email address to access it.

Patreon’s State of Create Report (15-min interactive read)
This is a great report about how creators feel about their relationships with platforms, but it’s also a great example of how to design a report to make it engaging and fun to read. It’s really interesting to see the complex relationships creators have with platforms - 53% of creators say it’s harder to reach their followers compared to 5 years ago, and 60% say Instagram does not always show followers their most important work. It’s hard out there.

Who Knows Who’s Watching What on TV? (6-minute read)
Some of you might know I’m a massive nerd for the history of how we’ve measured attention, particularly TV ratings. So this NYT article on how the fragmented streaming landscape is making it harder to agree on what is a ‘hit’ or ‘flop’ is right up my street. As Peter Olsen, Head of A&E Networks, says: “The thought that [TV ratings] was going to be 100 percent accurate? I don’t think anyone’s ever felt that way. But we need some type of agreed-upon third-party industry currency that we can just transact on.”

Stephen Johnson on ‘Condensing The Iceberg’ (8-minute read)
This is also right up my street - an elegant and fascinating article covering the nature of our attention, how media helps us focus attention, and what AI might be able to do to help with this: “I sometimes feel like this property is underplayed in accounts of how the smartphone is transforming our culture. The phone is not just capturing our attention because “surveillance capitalism” has manipulated our judgment. Our phones are addictive because they’re interesting. They’re addictive because they do a good job of condensing the iceberg.”

Roberta Flack’s Tryin’ Times (4-minute video)
I’m a huge fan of Roberta Flack, who passed away this week after a brilliant and influential career. Her first album, First Take, is one of my favourites, and is never far from the turntable in our house. Tryin’ Times is a soulful and meditative cover of Donny Hathaway’s original that feels incredibly relevant right now.

If you made it this far down the newsletter, you’d have realised that last week Anjali didn’t edit this bit, so it referenced Valentine’s day again. Well done if you noticed - we love you even more than the other subscribers!

Enjoy your weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings