Welcome to your weekly link collection of awesomeness from the Storythings team!

Matt’s been in Lisbon this week speaking about attention, and I was in Marrakech last week speaking about content formats and production. If you’d like us to speak about that, or indeed anything to do with building a community and platform for social impact changemakers, give us a shout.

💻 DATA POINT: WARC, LinkedIn and LIONS Advisory have released a new report that analysed 700 B2B campaigns to understand potential commercial and brand health uplifts when buyability signals are intentionally addressed. There is also a playbook on how to put them into practice. This one line says it all for me: “The Fear of Messing Up in front of your colleagues is bigger than the Fear of Missing Out on future career or business gains.” In other words, personal needs trump business ones. The three Rs: Recommendations, Relationships and Relatability should be CMOs’ top priority. Worth going through this one in full, there’s a lot of interesting writing in there.

How Elevators Work (data visualisation)

Why Making The Real Thing Still Holds Its Magic: Isabel + Helen On A Decade Of Putting Impossible Things Into Motion (18-min read)

Broadway Will Get A 1-Night Only Industrial Ramp Bill Pay Musical (2-min read)

Human Utility Assessment (online AI-based game)

The Greatest Short Story Writers Of All Time (5-min read and data analysis)

Advice From The New York Times Training Editor: Take These Four Steps Before You Roll Out New Things (8-min read)

Slop Grenades (1-min watch/read)

The Espionage Action Movie In Your Ears (2-min watch)

Back To A New Season: 10-Minute Playlist For Creative Focus (10-min listen)

📣 Brian Macreadie Crushes On The Art Of The Opening (21-min listen/watch) 📣

How Elevators Work (data visualisation)
I’ve actually thought about this when I’ve pressed buttons and had to wait for lifts in airports, or hotels, or indeed one of the tallest buildings in London recently which zoomed me up to the 35th floor or something, making my stomach churn. Learn the difference between single car and multiple car algorithms, and how Destination Dispatch elevators (where you don’t have control panels inside the elevator) are different from Relative System Response ones. Fascinating.

Why Making The Real Thing Still Holds Its Magic: Isabel + Helen On A Decade Of Putting Impossible Things Into Motion (18-min read)
Ten years on from being nominated as Ones To Watch by It’s Nice That, the duo of Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner are interviewed by the magazine ahead of their show at The Conran Shop for the London Design Festival this year. They talk about their work over the decade for organisations like Coachella and companies like Burberry and Converse, how play comes into their work, and their dedication to hands-on craft. It’s a great interview.

Broadway Will Get A 1-Night Only Industrial Ramp Bill Pay Musical (2-min read)
This one stands out but it could be interesting or it could be awful. The online bill paying startup Ramp is running a one-night-only musical show on Broadway about bill paying. You heard that right - bill paying. It’s called Bill Pay The Musical, and whatever you do, do not click through to the main website for the show because you’ll be waiting endlessly for the site to load. You can enter a ticket lottery to win a ticket though…

Human Utility Assessment (online AI-based game)
Artist Andrew Sheerin made this because of his interest in AI, games and systems theory. He explains the rationale for the game well: “As personal AI agents become intimate observers of how people think and behave, it is not unreasonable to imagine their knowledge being put to similar — and more extensive — application. This work asks what happens when machine observation turns into judgement and evaluation. And what do we care about how legible we are to machines and how they perceive us? Is there a difference between being better and performing better?” It is a bit - ok, very - freaky!

The Greatest Short Story Writers Of All Time (5-min read and data analysis)
Matt shared this piece and as literature lovers at Storythings, we loved it. Dan Sinykin did some solid analysis using Claude Code to figure out who the greatest short story writers in America are. He used extensive databases to do this, and some of the things he has learnt are illuminating: “I can run social network analysis to see which writers tend to cluster among the same magazines, giving me an overview of literary communities at various scales. I can see which MFA programs have special relationships with which journals. I can see the gender breakdown over time of the contributors to each journal.” And yes, Joyce Carol Oates is the GOAT!

Advice From The New York Times Training Editor: Take These Four Steps Before You Roll Out New Things (8-min read)
We’ve been increasingly discussing and putting into place policies at Storythings to make sure we are doing the right thing, particularly important as AI comes into a lot of things these days. In this piece, Eric Athas, deputy editor in the newsroom development and support team at the NYT, shares the six prompts he encourages writers to go through before deciding whether to use a new tool or not.

Slop Grenades (1-min watch/read)
Shane Parrish, podcast host of The Knowledge Project, talks to Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO, where Tobi discusses how AI can make more work for everyone when it is used badly. He calls this ‘slop grenades’, which is ‘when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it)’. Watch out for increasing use of the term!

The Espionage Action Movie In Your Ears (2-min watch)
Chris Mitchell, our Executive Audio Producer, shared this, and it’s a great example, as he says, of what video without video (or at least not traditional video), can do. Using animation, Goalhanger have created a brilliant trailer for the latest episode of their new ten-part audio thriller, Bear Hunt.

Back To A New Season: 10-Minute Playlist For Creative Focus (10-min listen)
It’s Friday, the sun is shining (if it isn’t shining where you are, this still works), and you need 10 minutes to focus on one thing and tick it off your list. This is a nice playlist to get you going. Even otherwise, it’s a great listen! From Keva Epale of the Your Creative Letter Substack.

📣 Brian Macreadie Crushes On The Art Of The Opening (21-min listen/watch) 📣
In the latest episode of our podcast Creative Crush, we have Brian Macreadie, Head of Marketing at law firm Addleshaw Goddard, talking to Hugh Garry about the art of the opening. In particular, he talks about the film The Hunt For Red October and the well-known Pearl & Dean cinema music jingle that has stayed in his head since he was a youngster! Don’t forget to catch all the previous episodes too, and if you know someone senior in B2B marketing who should be on the show, give us a shout!

Steve Bryant and Natalie Edwards have built the Games Research Starter Pack because it’s the thing they could have used if it existed when they started this new project they’re working on. It uses 886 sources (all checked by the two of them), is super comprehensive, and yes your robot can query it if you are so inclined, because there’s an MCP.

READ MORE IN STEVE’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