B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Hi again!
It’s Friday! And as usual at Storythings, we’ve gathered ten more lovely links to see you into the weekend.
I’m about to head off to Lisbon to the awesome Book 2.0 conference, so here’s the obligatory LinkedIn video teasing my session, which is all about why we should be optimistic about the future of attention. A couple of you emailed me excellent restaurant and cafe recommendations for Lisbon, but if anyone has any more, please hit reply.
And one last call for our Creative Friction Survey - we’d love to get as many responses as possible, and it will only take 5 mins to fill out!
💻 DATA POINT: I love Hannah Ritchie’s newsletter By The Numbers, and this week she shared some interesting data on happiness by age group. For the first time, in a lot of English speaking countries, there’s a big disparity between reported happiness amongst young people and older generations. But the reason I wanted to share it is because the stats for the UK show hardly any disparity by age group at all - we all say we’re about 6.6 out of 10. Which is probably less about our actual happiness, and more about our cultural conditioning to respond to the question “how are you doing?” with ‘mustn’t grumble!”
Set from Wildwood by Laika Studios
📕The Short Story
WTF is a Ghost Creator? (5-min read)
Storytelling Masterclass from Toy Story 3 (1h 12-min watch)
Not Everything Is For You (5-min read)
How Scared Should We Be Of AI Right Now? (9-min read)
The Thinking Is All That’s Left (8-min read)
New Nathan Fielder Doc Alert! (2-min watch)
Let’s Do a Couch To 5k For Reading (Daily Reading Exercise)
Wildwood Stop Motion Exhibition at The Design Museum (Exhibition in October)
The User Ladder - a Useful Tool for Newsletter Audiences (4-min read)
📣 FIRE- A New Framework For Digital Audiences (5-min read) 📣
It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.
📚 The Long Story
WTF is a Ghost Creator? (5-min read)
A few weeks we posted a Semafor article about creators being paid to read scripted political propoganda. This Digiday piece digs further, uncovering a network of micro influencers working for brands, often at a cheaper rate than paid advertising on the same platforms.
Storytelling Masterclass from Toy Story 3 (1h 12-min watch)
I’ve been re-reading Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc as research for my current series on Attention Matters, and it led me to this video from one of the writers on Toy Story 3. I’m about halfway through, but it’s an absolute masterclass on the hard graft of great storytelling.
Not Everything Is For You (5-min read)
Thanks to Steve Bryant for sharing this really lovely set of pseudo-scientific graphs from Ty Finck, mapping how his attitudes to various things - nostalgia, the Beatles, fried foods, mosh pits - changed as he got older. It’ll make you want to go away and draw your own (my graph of being a Spurs fan would be extremely choppy).
How Scared Should We Be Of AI Right Now? (9-min read)
I went to see Cory Doctorow talk at Brighton Dome last week, and I love his incredible ability to create metaphors that help us understand the material and social impact of tech. This article by Cal Newport does something similar, cutting through the hype we’re seeing every day about AI to ask the really important question - is AI a threat? or are the people controlling it just really weird?
The Thinking Is All That’s Left (4-min read)
This is an excellent short read from our friends at Brxnd.ai to follow up from their ‘On AI And Writing’ post we shared a few weeks ago. Worth it for the final bullet point - “To steal from Picasso, LLMs are going to be better than you at “learning the rules like a pro.” They will not be better at breaking them like an artist.”
New Nathan Fielder Doc Alert! (2-min watch)
You are either the kind of person who can’t click on a new Nathan Fielder trailer fast enough, or you can’t stand his work. I’m the former, and if you’re the latter, please try this very short trailer for his new documentary about convicted tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. It’s genuinely odd and uncanny, with an incredible attention to detail - I watched it three times before I noticed what she was doing with her foot at the end, and what a ‘tell’ that is for her character.
Let’s Do a Couch To 5k For Reading (Daily Reading Exercise)
I don’t think we included this in the newsletter before, and it’s something I’m referencing in my talk at Lisbon next week. Author Naomi Alderman wanted to help people regain the habit of reading, so used her newsletter to run a ‘Couch to 5k’ exercise for reading. It’s a great example of how we can borrow audience behaviours that are familiar in one area (running) and apply them in another area (reading). Such a smart idea!
Wildwood Stop Motion Exhibition at The Design Museum (Exhibition in October)
I’ve linked to trailers from Wildwood, the new movie from stop-motion auteurs Laika Studios, before, and I can’t wait to see the film when it comes out in October. Even better, The Design Museum in London are having a fantastic looking exhibition showing some of the sets and models from the film. We’ll be booking tickets asap!
The User Ladder - a Useful Tool for Newsletter Audiences (4-min read)
I haven’t linked to a resource or tool from The Inbox Collective for a while, so here’s a great post about something you can apply directly to growing your audience - the User Ladder.
📣 FIRE- A New Framework For Digital Audiences (5-min read) 📣
On a similar note to the link above, we spent 2024 and 2025 helping Art UK create a new framework for their content strategy. We wanted to help them think about their audience’s goals, not the platforms, so developed a tool called FIRE, named after four key user needs - Find, Immerse, React and Express. I love this write up because it shows not just the framework, but also the other tips and advice we gave them on things like value propositions and prototyping. If you’d like us to help you create new content frameworks and workflows, then hit reply or get in touch!
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Jer Thorp is a data artist and author of the excellent book Living In Data. 15 years ago he was asked to come up with an algorithm to design how the names of the many people killed in the 9/11 attacks would appear on the memorial in NYC. His story of how he did it, and how the names still resonate with him, is a fitting tribute on the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
READ MORE IN JER’S 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
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
