This week I spent a couple of days at Advertising Week Europe, and one of the sessions with LinkedIn was about the use of video on the platform, particularly for B2B audiences. Elfried Samba, CEO and co-founder of the agency Butterfly Effect, said something that was right up our alley at Storythings: for brands it’s all about serialisation of content now - they need to invest in IP and storytelling, as audiences want to see if they can go up against Hollywood to keep them engaged. That’s exactly what we do, so give us a shout if you’ve been thinking about making your B2B brand more interesting: industries like finance, insurance and consulting are areas we have particular skill in when it comes to developing content formats that are not snoozefests!

💻 DATA POINT: Another session I attended was by Signal Hill Insights on the growth of podcasts, particularly video podcasts. Their latest research report is due to be released soon, but they teased some snippets at the session: 85% of UK podcast consumers are watching video podcasts, and 45% are watching on smart TVs. Younger consumers aged 18-34 are more likely to do both the above compared to other ages.

Does Your Video Podcast Look Like Trash? (25-min read)

The Secret Lives of Six Body Doubles (13-min read)

Kevin Kelly’s The Big Here Quiz (4-min read)

Ford Docuseries On Apple TV: Every Ground Is Our Proving Ground (multiple TV spots)

Goalhanger On Making Subscriber Revenue Growth Look As Easy As Tap-Ins (6-min read)

WikiCity (dataviz of top 100,000 most-viewed Wikipedia articles)

Understanding Young News Audiences At A Time Of Rapid Change (online report)

Invitation Is All You Need (site chronicling a security breach against AI-powered systems)

See How The Iconic LIFE Noble Notebook Is Made In Japan (7-min watch)

📣 From Lighthouse To Lighthouse (12-min read) 📣

Does Your Video Podcast Look Like Trash? (25-min read)
Neatly following the data point above, this link shared by Hugh is from Good Tape Studio, and is a deep dive into the lighting and set design of several popular video podcasts. There are a few things to consider, and clearly with the critique you can see not enough podcast shows look at all of them: camera setup, background, lighting, comfort, microphones, multiuse sets.

The Secret Lives of Six Body Doubles (13-min read)
Matt shared this one, and it’s an entertaining read. Who knew that in the Netflix series Vladimir, Rachel Weisz had a hand double, Jacqueline Leventhal, who was used in car scenes because Weisz didn’t have a driving license in Toronto, where the series was shot?!

Kevin Kelly’s The Big Here Quiz (4-min read)
Internet legend Kevin Kelly asks 30 questions to ‘elevate your awareness of the greater place in which you live’.

Ford Docuseries On Apple TV: Every Ground Is Our Proving Ground (multiple TV spots)
Ford is using Apple' TV’s sequential ad capabilities to launch a mini-docuseries throughout the Formula 1 race weekend: “From Friday practice through the Sunday Grand Prix, viewers will watch a progressing narrative. We are using the screen to draw a direct line between the high-speed drama of F1 and the engineering reality of the vehicles that pull up to job sites and trailheads across America.”

Goalhanger On Making Subscriber Revenue Growth Look As Easy As Tap-Ins (6-min read)
Goalhanger’s podcast team seems to be on a roll, with 250,000 paying subscribers across its network of shows, and an estimated subscription revenue of £15m per year. Here’s an interview that looks at the business strategy behind their remarkable success.

WikiCity (dataviz of top 100,000 most-viewed Wikipedia articles)
A rather detailed data visualisation of the top 100,000 most-viewed Wikipedia articles, imagined as buildings in a city. There’s also player mode, where you can ‘fly and destroy’ parts of the city, and random mode where you are shown a random Wikipedia article from the city. On a related note, Xikipedia is a version of Wikipedia that’s available fully offline once it downloads.

Understanding Young News Audiences At A Time Of Rapid Change (online report)
The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford released this report about younger news audiences this week. Broadly, there is “agreement across generations when it comes to core attitudes around things like impartiality and trust. On the other hand, we see some variation around the edges of traditional news. Young people are more interested in news topics that are entertaining and fun, and more open to receiving this from individual creators. While they stand by neutrality, the baseline of what counts as a legitimate point of view has moved somewhat on issues like social justice.” 

Invitation Is All You Need (site chronicling a security breach against AI-powered systems)
This is quite a sombre look at how AI-powered systems are vulnerable to hackers. In an experiment run by security researchers, we learn how attacks that we might have thought to be too ‘complex’ against AI-powered systems to carry out, can fairly easily be achieved by an indirect prompt injection into a Google invitation. The team disclosed their findings to Google, who thankfully deployed dedicated mitigations.

See How The Iconic LIFE Noble Notebook Is Made In Japan (7-min watch)
Via Robin Sloan, this is catnip for anyone who loves stationery (me me me and maybe you you you?!). The JetPens team visited a factory in Japan where this iconic notebook is made, and it really is mesmerising.

📣 From Lighthouse To Lighthouse (12-min read) 📣
A beautiful look at radical bookshops in Edinburgh as places for creating solidarity and activism, in this piece for Futures in Draft, which we produce for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Joel Harrison on finding the perfect niche for B2B influencer marketing in 2026: he talks about how credibility matters more than reach, and creative freedom produces better results than brand control. This was echoed in the LinkedIn session I attended this week (which I referred to at the beginning of this newsletter), where Dawn Riley, a senior Adobe leader, also spoke about how they are seeing a lot of growth when they use influencer marketing at the bottom of the funnel.

READ JOEL’S LINKEDIN POST HERE →

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