B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 Hey there!
If you’re an independent agency or know one that produces good work, I’m a judge for the Indie Agency News Top 40 Classic Awards, and the final deadline for entries is May 1st. Let your pals know!
💻 DATA POINT: New research from Bain & Company shows that the switch to AI-led search is happening in B2B markets as well, as buyers increasingly create shortlists within LLMs. As the report says: “They’re using AI to construct the consideration set, then turning to websites, review platforms, and YouTube demonstrations to validate what the model suggests. If a vendor’s brand doesn’t surface in that first AI-generated list, it may never make it to the validation stage.” This echoes what we have been saying about search in general, and we fully expected this to happen within generative AI searches, maybe not as soon though.
📕 The Short Story
Is YouTube The Donor Museums Aren’t Thinking About? (3-min read)
Audio Road Trip: On Our Minds Season 6 (Podcast series)
Dexter Meets Walter White (1-min video)
You’re About To Feel The AI Money Squeeze (16-min read)
Consumers Outnumber Producers (2-min read)
Finally! The Trailer For The Coyote Vs. ACME Movie (2-min watch)
Subscription Cost Visualizer (dataviz to see how your subscription money shapes up)
📣Under The Quiet Of The Moon (14-min read) 📣
…the rise of AI-generated content is making trust more visible. Readers are increasingly willing to pay for work that feels specific, informed, and human.
📚 The Long Story
Is YouTube The Donor Museums Aren’t Thinking About? (3-min read)
Via friend of Storythings Ash Mann’s newsletter, digital consultant for the arts Haydn Corrodus on why building an archive on YouTube will attract the right kind of interested audience that museums today aren’t monetising enough. The underlying principle is applicable to B2B as well.
Audio Road Trip: On Our Minds Season 6 (Podcast series)
We worked with PBS Student Reporting Labs a few years ago, and ahead of the US mid-terms, this is a great podcast to get a flavour for what young people really think in the country. Student journalists capture what it’s like being young in every corner of the US, ‘from beekeepers in the five boroughs and a pizza joint in the Rockies, to the hallowed walls of a Jersey Dunkin Donuts. And, a conversation with Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall-Kimmerer.’
Dexter Meets Walter White (1-min video)
As someone on X said, ‘it’s hard to believe that AI video is this good already’. Some of you may think this is blasphemy, but surely there’s an audience for a Heisenberg vs. Dexter stand-off?!
Hacking The Math Problem Behind Newsletter Subscriber Growth (11-min read)
Excellent post from Storyarb, who break down the numbers behind what it takes to grow a newsletter successfully. Through methodical working-out of figures, they help you learn how “the best newsletter operators aren’t the best writers. They’re the best at knowing what a subscriber is worth and building backward from there.”
You’re About To Feel The AI Money Squeeze (16-min read)
Those of us who regularly use AI, with or without paid subscriptions have likely run into the token limit problem. That is only going to get worse, as AI companies are going to likely increase the cost of token access in order to justify the cost of the massive data centres they are creating to process said tokens (and keep training their LLMs). How many tokens are needed, you ask? Not quadrillions, but sextillions. As The Verge says, “to achieve the $2 trillion in annual spend Gartner calculated, providers would need to be generating, by conservative estimates, a cumulative 10 sextillion tokens per year. (To make that slightly less abstract, a quadrillion has 15 zeros, and a sextillion has 21.)”
The Rise of ‘Nano-Newsletters’: Why 500 Subscribers Beats 50,000 (5-min read)
Storythings beats this drum all the time, so it’s good to see someone else say this too: your audience is made up niches, or perhaps even just one. Find them, instead of chasing growth from a generic audience base. HT Ash Mann.
Consumers Outnumber Producers (2-min read)
Seth Godin, one of the original marketing gurus of the internet, reminds us why it is important to just produce the good stuff, with AI or not.
Finally! The Trailer For The Coyote Vs. ACME Movie (2-min watch)
Quite fun to watch the trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie, coming out in August. If you’re not clued in, then also read the summary by Kottke about how the movie got to this point (or, very nearly how it did not!). There’s a script of a film there, one might say….
Subscription Cost Visualizer (dataviz to see how your subscription money shapes up)
Useful little tool via Swiss Miss - enter all the subscriptions you’re paying for, and see which ones are taking the largest chunk of your income!
📣Under The Quiet Of The Moon (14-min read) 📣
This is a beautiful meditative read with some amazing pictures from Alaska. Learn about how the ancient art of making ivalu - braided thread used to stitch seal-skin boats in Alaska - gave Rachel Naŋinaaq Edwardson the opportunity to heal, and think about how communal arts in general can transform the individual.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Simon Raper, data scientist and statistician, writes a useful and at times hilarious ‘dictionary of bullshit for statistics, AI and data science’ technically for people early in their career, but also if you are ‘inclined to take people at their word’! Look at the entry for ‘storytelling’ 😂
Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!
Have a great weekend!
Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
