Great Explainers, Google Experiments and Comms Tools

Hey all,

We’re hiring! We’re looking for a project manager to join our team. The role is full-time and at least two days per week will be in our central Brighton office. If you understand creative processes and have good experience in supporting creative teams to deliver their best work, we’d love to hear from you.

Do you want to hang out with Storythings and a bunch of creatives from around the world? Do you like to chat, or just listen to people chat about brilliant creative projects they’ve stumbled across recently? Proper Fancy is our agency show-and-tell that we open up to everyone. It’s a chance to get to know us and us to know you. People who attend occasionally end up working with us. So join us next Thursday, 28th September. It’s totally free and a lot of fun.

Have a fantastic weekend and enjoy this week’s stories!

Hugh

Change the Ending: A Moving Animated Story From Alzheimer’s Research (2 min watch)

Formats Unpacked: Wired’s 5 Levels (5 min read)

The Do Lectures Ultimate Book List (list)

Ros Atkins: 10 Attributes of a Good Explainer (3 min read)

The Long Slow Death of the TV Schedule (4 min watch)

The Top Ten Tools for Communication Planning  (list)

A Nice Visual Explainer of Generative AI (10 min read)

The Joys of Designing For Louis Vuitton Foundation’s Family Festival (4 min read)

How Giving Away More Free Content Helped Me Get - and Convert - More Subscribers (4 min read)

Play the Cello With This Lovely Google Experiment (3 min play)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Berlin, and Ibiza. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Strategy – Do you struggle to understand constantly changing audience behaviours, and what strategies you need to reach them?2. Content Format Development – Do you want to develop and test content formats that give you a direct relationship with your audience? (e.g. videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc).3. Production – Do you need help creating and running an existing or new content format?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

Change the Ending: A Moving Animated Story From Alzheimer’s ResearchThis incredibly moving and very smart animation plays on Disney’s love of happy-ever-after stories. But with Alzheimer’s being a leading cause of death in the UK and where every three minutes someone receives a dementia diagnosis, this story’s ending has a twist. This is a really great piece of work that has moved me to action after watching.

Formats Unpacked: Wired’s 5 LevelsA lot of the work we do for clients involves researching interesting ways to explain their complex fields. If your stories about climate change, finance, science and medicine are not aligned with your audience’s understanding of the subject, they will be ignored. This week’s Formats Unpacked looks at a format that is almost guaranteed to leave most readers with a greater understanding of a complex issue.

The Do Lectures Ultimate Book ListEvery year the people behind the excellent Do Lectures publish a long booklist of the non-fiction books they and their network have been reading over the last 12 months. It’s broken down into categories such as Creativity, Productivity, and Wellbeing. It’s a very useful list worth bookmarking for reference.

Ros Atkins: 10 Attributes of a Good ExplainerRegular readers will know I’m a big fan of the BBC newsreader’s wonderful explainers. His new book The Art of Explanation came out this week and is a must-read for anyone looking for ways to communicate complexity to audiences or customers. If you don’t have time to read it here’s 3 minutes on the 10 Attributes of a Good Explainer.

The Long Slow Death of the TV ScheduleOur very own Matt Locke’s Substack How To Measure Ghosts looks at audience attention. This week he’s written about how insights from scenario planning around digital media he did while at the BBC 20 years ago is finally becoming a reality.

The Top Ten Tools for Communication PlanningThis is a really useful list for all you comms people, courtesy of Julian Cole.

A Nice Visual Explainer of Generative AIThis nice piece of scrollytelling from the Visual Storytelling Team at the Financial Times does a good job of helping you understand how tools like ChatGPT work.

The Joys of Designing For Louis Vuitton Foundation’s Family FestivalI absolutely love this identity design for the foundation’s Family Festival. It looks incredible and strikes a perfect balance, appealing to parents and children alike.

How Giving Away More Free Content Helped Me Get - and Convert - More SubscribersNewsletters have served us and our clients well over the years. More recently, as clients realise they need to take back ownership of their audience from Musk and Zuckerberg, we’re getting asked to produce more. If you are looking to monetise a newsletter, this is a useful read from the Inbox Collective.

Play the Cello With This Lovely Google ExperimentCreated by Google Arts & Culture Lab artist-in-residence David Li, Viola the Bird is a playful experiment that features a string instrument inspired by the cello that can be played by anyone, regardless of musical experience.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend, you can subscribe below and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

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

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