Four Ingredients For Great Feedback, What Sesame Street Learned From Ads, and a Beautiful Story Told Beautifully

Happy Friday! A huge Storythings welcome to new subscribers. Where’ve you been? We’ve only been doing this Friday-afternoon-newsletter-thing for almost a decade! Feel free to say hello in the comments or by replying. If you really feel like it, you can hit that little ❤️ button above.

Eagle-eyed subscribers may have noticed the newsletter looks a tiny bit different this week. As mentioned last week, it’s because we’ve just switched hosting from Mailchimp to Substack. Nothing else is changing, just the same old format of ten stories we’ve really liked this week.

This week Rob Hinchcliffe from the London in Bits newsletter unpacked Dorktown for Formats Unpacked. If you want to know how a YouTube format uses the restrictions of its genre and turns them into a virtue, check out Rob’s piece.

Right, I’m off for a curry then going to see Moonage Daydream. Have a fantastic weekend y’all.

Hugh

Iain Tait on Dan Wieden - the Introverted Titan of Advertising (3 min read)How Sesame Street Applied Commercial Techniques to Achieve a Social Good (4 min read)15 Years on From Two Keynotes That Kick-Started the 21st Century (11 min read)Great Feedback Has These Four Ingredients (1 min watch)Artists Share Their Designs in Solidarity With Women in Iran (1 min read)Heavyweight Podcast - “Another Beautiful Story Told Beautifully” (37 min listen)People Don’t Have Short Attention Spans. They Have Short Consideration Spans (7 min read)What the Chinese Censors Cut From Big Bang Theory (4 min read)Rules For Online Sanity (List)How to Film a Hamburger Perfectly Falling Into a Model’s Hand (1 min read)

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Iain Tait on Dan Wieden - the Introverted Titan of AdvertisingLast week, the marketing and advertising world lost a titan of the industry. Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden+Kennedy. Iain Tait, who spent seven years at Wieden+Kennedy, writes about how Dan made it OK to be different, how following a process leads to bland work, and how introverts like Dan managed difficult social events. (3 min read)How Sesame Street Applied Commercial Techniques to Achieve a Social GoodA really good read on how kids singing along to beer commercials inspired one of the most important TV shows ever. This piece is full of really useful examples of how to tell stories for social change and how to allow the audience to see themselves and their situations in the characters: “Oscar, the green grumpy character who lived in a trashcan, was crafted to represent the more challenging encounters that kids experience in daily life - ‘Oscar’s the dark side of everybody. He’s what children are constantly told they must not do. Don’t say that, it’s bad. Don’t do that. Don’t talk back.’”(4 min read)15 Years on From Two Keynotes That Kick-Started the 21st CenturyHistorian Eric Hobsbawm argued that the 20th Century began with the gunfire of WW1 in 1914. As our very own Matt Locke points out “history never quite aligns with the maths we use to divide it.” Matt tells the story of two famous keynotes that happened in the same city, barely a few months apart in 2007. They have had a profound influence on society, so much more than was possible to understand at the time. (11 min read)Great Feedback Has These Four IngredientsI found this short but really useful video on Russell Davies’ excellent newsletter Afternoon Slow. (1 min watch)Artists Share Their Designs in Solidarity With Women in IranDesigners and artists around the world are using their designs to share their own solidarity with the protesters, who have been burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and publicly flaunting the ‘morality laws’.(1 min read)Heavyweight Podcast - “Another Beautiful Story Told Beautifully”When Heavyweight is good it’s really good. Jonathan Goldstein’s unique delivery brings humour that saves sentimental stories from sounding too soppy. The production always shines. And the stories, well, they’re what really drive the series. This week’s episode is a great example of all those qualities working incredibly hard. On Dan’s first date with his wife Nancy, a stranger took their photograph. Nineteen years later, Dan wants the photo back. But to get it, he'll have to face the last person he wants to.(37 min listen)People Don’t Have Short Attention Spans. They Have Short Consideration SpansThere is a lot to like in this interview with the writers of one of the most popular business publications on Substack. Particularly this: “If you are writing and publishing valuable, different thinking, and if that thinking helps your target readers unlock meaningful outcomes and breakthroughs in their lives, then it doesn’t matter if your content is 100 words or 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 words, readers will read all of it. Word count is, and has always been, a terrible measure of value.”(7 min read)What the Chinese Censors Cut From The Big Bang TheoryOur favourite visual storyteller The Pudding watched 100 episodes of The Big Bang Theory on the Chinese streaming service Youku to find out what the government chose to censor and why. This piece about the trend of TikTok creators in China condensing movies down to a few minutes is also worth a read.(4 min read)Rules For Online SanityA very useful list, not just for staying sane. Points 1-5 will go a long way in helping you in persuading someone to see your point of view over their own. (List)How to Film a Hamburger Perfectly Falling Into a Model’s HandI’m not the only person that watches food ads on TV and wonders how they make burgers fall into a model’s hand, layer by layer, without creating a total mess. Well, now I know.(1 min read)

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.