How System One Reinvented Their B2B Content, The History of Moon Photos, and What it Felt Like to be Online in 1995

👋🏼 Hello

🔔 Thanks to those of you who are voting in our new weekly polls. The winner of our first poll question: What makes you actually watch a B2B video? was, reassuringly, Compelling Human Stories on 51% of the votes. Last week we asked What is your favourite format to consume B2B content? and the winner, on 47% of the votes, was [checks notes] PDFs????? You people are weird. Thankfully, Podcasts were a close second.

Got a question you’d like us to include as our poll of the week? - just drop me an email!

📕 The Short Story

How System 1 Reinvented Their B2B marketing (5-min read)

Why London’s Thieves Are Burying Phones in Flowerbeds (8-min read)

Equator: A new Magazine of Politics, Culture and Art (30-min browse)

Very Cool Board/Video Game Mashup ($499 plus shipping!)

Chabuddy G is BACK! on Scammed FM (5-min read)

How NASA Invented Moon Photography (15-min scroll)

What it Felt Like to be Online in 1995 (10-min read)

Why Gathering Attention is More Important than Scale (6-min read)

Excellent New Time Guessing Game (You’ll lose a lot of time to this)

(5-min read)

📚 The Long Story

How System 1 Reinvented Their B2B marketing (5-min read)
System 1 wanted to get more long-term value from their content strategy, so started the brilliant podcast Uncensored CMO. This short case study is a great example of the business value you get from investing in a long-running format: “In the past year alone, the podcast has delivered 28,559 new contacts – up 174% – with zero paid media investment. Uncensored CMO is now one of System1’s top lead-generation channels.”

Why London’s Thieves Are Burying Phones in Flowerbeds (8-min read)
This is a fascinating story about what happens when someone steals your phone. But I’m including it as a great example of something we recommend to our clients a lot in our ‘storyfinding’ workshops: start with a question you don’t know the answer to, and then share what you find.

Equator: A new Magazine of Politics, Culture and Art (30-min browse)
This looks very interesting, and is adjacent to something we’re about to [*cough*] launch for a client - a new publication that is a “collective response to a crisis that is as much spiritual and intellectual as it is political and economic.”

Very Cool Board/Video Game Mashup ($499 plus shipping!)
We’re moving offices at the moment, and I found lots of bits of indie tech that I’d bought from Kickstarter projects and then never really gone back and used. So I’m probably not going to buy this, but included it because it does look REALLY cool. And the URL is excellent too!

Chabuddy G is BACK! on Scammed FM (5-min read)
Anjali shared this great example of using talent in your content strategy. The character is appropriate to the message, the stunt actually makes sense, and it’s all for a good cause. I hope this wins some awards!

How NASA Invented Moon Photography (15-min scroll)
You know we love NYT scrolly-telling articles at Storythings, and this is a beautiful example, telling the story of how NASA developed cameras and technology to take photographs on the moon.

What it Felt Like to be Online in 1995 (10-min read)
This is a lovely dip into the personal archive of our friend (and one-time Storythings collaborator) Phil Gyford. He’s one of the OG UK bloggers (and creator of the brilliant Pepys Diary site) and his accounts of what it felt like to be online in the mid 90s are just fascinating.

Why Gathering Attention is More Important than Scale (6-min read)
Ok, I am guilty of posting yet another Kyle Chayka essay. I’m not stalking him, honest. I’m justifying this one because it creates a lovely metaphor for the shift from seeing audiences as something you scale on rented platforms to a community you build closely around you - ‘Gathering Attention’. I love that.

Excellent New Time Guessing Game (You’ll lose a lot of time to this)
Anjali posted this and warned we’d lose time to it. She wasn’t wrong. It’s an excellently designed variant on the ‘geo guessr’ format, where instead of trying to place random google streetview images on a map, you’re trying to place random library photos in place and time. It’s really good fun!

How To Make Attention Grabbing Formats (5-min read)
I’ve started the latest series on Attention Matters, which is going to follow the Storythings team as we design and launch a new B2B content series. We’re going to share everything, warts and all. So if you’re developing your own content, or want to find out how we do it, subscribe now!

💌 Humans of LinkedIn

Welcome back to the section where we highlight interesting people saying interesting things on LinkedIn. This week, my algorithm resurfaced a great post from our friend John Peabody, Director of Content at Aspen Institute, linked to his recent research on the state of creativity, which we shared in an earlier newsletter. This sentence really stood out:

“I think right now, in this moment, the best creatives, the ones who are going to stand out, are the ones who are offline, engaging with the world. Just like the best journalists do a bit of "shoe leather" reporting, hitting the streets to uncover original stories, instead of sitting on their computers trying to find something new to write about.

So this is my call to action: Close the laptop. Go outside. Engage with the world. That’s where the best original creative ideas and work will come from.

READ JOHN’S POST IN FULL 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