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Hiya,

We had a proper Proper Fancy catch-up yesterday (no that’s not a typo), with a vibrant discussion on creative projects spanning decades. Join us next month for the next one - it’s on February 27th Thursday at 1pm, online, super chill. Bookmark it in your calendars now!

We’re incredibly excited to be working on an editorial project that we will be announcing soon, with a large UK foundation. The work has so much potential and, dare I say, responsibility, in the political and economic climate we live in now. In the lead-up to a launch later in the year, we’re now hiring for 2 important roles: Managing Editor (full-time) and Audience Growth Manager (part-time). The deadline for applications for both is February 14th. Please share these roles with your networks - we’re especially keen on getting applications from under-represented communities.

The latest episode in Payroll Around The World, the podcast we produce for ADP, is out. In this one, we visit China. Tune in to learn about the complexities of navigating local payroll-related regulations around provinces in the country. You’ll learn something - I know I did!

We have been working with director Jeannie Finlay for a few months, and her latest documentary Your Fat Friend is out now on BBC iPlayer. It charts the rise of writer and activist Aubrey Gordon from an anonymous blogger to best-selling author and beloved podcaster. It is a film about ‘fatness, family, the complexities of change and the deep, messy feelings we hold about our bodies’. Watch it!

Lastly, if you’re going to SXSW in Austin this year, Matt and I will be there running a workshop on B2B marketing, which you can sign up for (come say hi!). We’d love to catch up for coffees, breakfasts, dinners - whatever suits any interesting folk there. Drop us a line if you’ll be there March 7-12!

Right, on to the links - we know that’s why you’re here! Have a great weekend - enjoy.

Anjali

Medcast on Saturday Night Live (2-minute watch)

The Death of Scenius (7-minute read)

WARC’s Multiplier Effect Report (100-page report)

Algorithmic Ranking is Unfairly Maligned (10-minute read)

A Sonification of Fires in Southern Sweden in 2018 (7-minute watch)

How Algorithms Make People, Places and Ideas Boring (1-hour listen)

Interesting Ships Sailing In the Firth of Forth in 2024 (website with data visualisation)

The Umault Ad That Took 4 Years to Make (6-minute watch)

How NYMag’s Mark Peterson Used Horror Techniques To Capture a Trump Inauguration Eve Party (1-minute read with photos)

Reuters Made a Cozy Game About Cozy Games (2-minute read + game to explore)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

Medcast on Saturday Night Live (2-minute watch)
This is hilarious - an SNL sketch about getting men aged 20-45 to go the doctor for regular check-ups, with a podcast studio standing in as a doctor’s room. Don’t get what I mean? Spend 2 minutes watching this and start your weekend with a laugh!

The Death of Scenius (7-minute read)
Ian Leslie in top form as he chronicles the history of scenius, a term coined by Brian Eno to illustrate “collective genius that can emerge when a population of diverse and fertile talents living in geographical proximity form a loose community or ‘scene’.” Urban areas of concentration are no longer the fertile ground for creativity they used to be, for a combination of reasons including real estate prices and the growing influence of the internet, which is a huge boon but also a reason many people don’t feel the need to meet their peers as much as they used to. At least, not as much as people did in ‘Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, Vienna in the late nineteenth century; Montmartre in the early twentieth century; Harlem in the 1920s; London in the 1960s; or Seattle in the 1990s’.

WARC’s Multiplier Effect Report (100-page report)
You’ll need to sit down and take your time with this one, but WARC’s latest research with Analytic Partners, BERA.ai, Prophet and System1 is another proof point in the importance of not isolating brand from performance. It’s brand x performance, not brand + performance. Focussing only on performance, as brands like Nike found to their detriment recently, won’t benefit overall sales or brand in the long run. There’s loads to dig into here. Requires you to fill in a form, but it’s free, as a heads up.

Algorithmic Ranking is Unfairly Maligned (10-minute read)
The Dynomight newsletter with a piece on the importance of algorithms, whether we like it or not. But don’t despair, it’s not all doom and gloom. Those of us who remember a pre-algorithmic feed internet probably do miss blogs and RSS (they still exist, of course, just not as popular as they once were), but the good thing is the right algorithms can still be made, if enough people want it. The question is: do we? “In principle, we could all just refuse to use services without control. But I’m skeptical this would work, because of rug-pulls. The same forces that made TikTok into TikTok will still exist and history is filled with companies providing control early on, getting a dominant position, and then taking the control away. Theoretically everyone could leave at that point, but that rarely seems to happen in practice. Instead, I think the control needs to be somehow “baked in” from the beginning. There needs to be some kind of technological/legal/social structure in place that makes rug pulls impossible.”

A Sonification of Fires in Southern Sweden in 2018 (7-minute watch)
Yesterday at Proper Fancy, someone mentioned Duncan Deere and Miriam Quick’s audiovisual artwork Scorched Earth, which uses data from forest fires in Sweden in 2018. Today - yes, you heard it here first! - they released the full video of their project. Sounds and visuals increase slowly in frequency depicting the land burnt over time. As they say in their description of the video on YouTube, “Scorched Earth is more than just a depiction of data; it is a commentary on the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires due to climate change.”

How Algorithms Make People, Places and Ideas Boring (1-hour listen)
More on algorithms, which there is no escaping from: here’s one of our favourite writers Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld, as a guest on the Two Percent podcast with Michael Easter. Even though you’ll know a lot of what he says if you’ve read the book, there are some fun sequences like a rapid fire round and some more recent observations on how it is important to be mindful of the content we consume. I will say that attention and algorithms are all over these days. Here are a couple of bonus links: Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource with this long read on how Trump mastered the new attention age, and a review of Hayes’ book in The New Yorker by Daniel Immerwahr.

Interesting Ships Sailing in to the Firth of Forth in 2024 (website with data visualisation)
James Wheare published a visual report of shipping traffic detected by his Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver in 2024 in Edinburgh. It includes stats, maps, photos and timelapse footage. A nice way to spend a few minutes, or more if you’re a fan of boats!

The Umault Ad That Took 4 Years to Make (6-minute watch)
We’re big fans of Umault’s work here at Storythings. It’s not often we say that about fellow agencies. But this video - and the story of how the agency kept iterating on their sci-fi ad, with family members as the actors in the film, is truly cool!

How NYMag’s Mark Peterson Used Horror Techniques To Capture a Trump Inauguration Eve Party (1-minute read with photos)
Unlike some of my Storythings colleagues, I’m not really into the horror genre, but I do appreciate the photography techniques used here!

Reuters Made a Cozy Game About Cozy Games (2-minute read + game to explore)
If you’d like to do something positive for your mental health, play this cozy game from Reuters. Tip: the action you need is scrolling.

That’s us for this week. Please share this with your friends and colleagues - much appreciated. Drop us a line if you have ideas for how to improve too, we’re all ears.

Have a great weekend, all!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

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