Letters To Our Sons, A Story About Flash, and How B2B Brands Win In The AI Era

Ten creative links that inspired us this week

Author

Anjali Ramachandran
November 07, 2025

B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN

👋🏼 Hello!

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📕 The Short Story

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“In short, as journalists find themselves increasingly facing “dark participation” in the form of online harassment and abuse on social media platforms, these predictions suggest that regard for the public remains undiminished.”

Jacob L. Nelson and Gregory P. Perreault

📚 The Long Story

Agatha Christie Meets Mr. Men In New Children’s Books (2-min read)  
Matt shared the news of this lovely new literary character collaboration - Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple are going to work with Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Men and Little Miss characters to solve crimes in new books aimed at younger children.

Stephen Graham and Orly Klein’s Letters To Our Sons (4-min read and 2-min video)
Adolescence actor Stephen Graham is joining forces with psychology lecturer Orly Klein and crowdsourcing letters from fathers to their sons for a new book. What a lovely idea. Apparently Orly had male friends write letters to her 13-year-old son for his birthday, and Graham was approached by lots of people after the release of Adolescence. I’m sure this book will result in some strong emotions by people who read it.

Journalists Are Souring On Social Media Platforms, An Analysis of 11 Years of Nieman Lab’s Predictions Suggests (6-min read)
This is a walk down memory lane. I sort of felt we were heading in that direction, so it was good to see this validation from Nieman Lab. They’ve looked at their annual predictions for 11 years and you can read about how journalists were so gung-ho about social media with YouTube and Twitter around 2012, but much less so today when misinformation and diminishing trust in media abound. The good news? Even if journalists abandon social media platforms, they still want to maintain strong relationships with the people they want to reach.

Three Ways With First Person (11-min read)
If you’re a writer or a reader or just a lover of good words, this is a nice essay dissecting the first-person mode of writing. Author Gretchen Shirm looks at Percival Everett’s ‘James’, Katie Kitamura’s ‘Audition’, and Elizabeth Strout’s ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ as examples of this kind of writing.

Who Is Watson? A Short Doc About IBM’s Magic Marketing Moment (18-min watch)
Love this B2B documentary about IBM’s Watson and it’s well-known Jeopardy appearance, featuring interviews with several key people who were at IBM at the time. It’s exactly the kind of film that I see winning awards at Cannes and the like in the B2B category.

When Stick Figures Fought: A Story About Flash (18-min read)
A story about the genesis of Flash-animated series Xiao Xiao in China, and its creator Zhu Zhiqiang. The stick figure animated series had a huge fan following (“I received 1,200 emails in one day. There was no junk in them, and 80% of them were not written by Chinese people, but by people from all over the world”), but Nike started creating similar versions of the figures and soon Xiao Xiao was gone, even as Zhiqiang became a coder at - yep, an advertising agency!

Superpowers Index 2025: How B2B Brands Win In The AI Era (report)
Dentsu has released their 2025 Superpowers Index, the largest study of B2B buying behaviours globally.

Why M. M. LaFleur Is Creating A Dedicated LinkedIn Strategy (5-min read)
The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot that this is a B2C brand, not B2B, but the way American womenswear brand M.M. LaFleur has doubled down on LinkedIn (and is seeing results) is worth a quick read.

You Can Now Make Your Own Wordle Puzzles (Tool)
This is for all the Wordle and word game fans out there (of which we have a few in the office as well!). Create your own Wordle games and share them with your friends - go and show off!

The Vault of Culture: Narrative String Theory (list/resource)
Darren in our team shared this really cool resource for those of you who are TV or film fans: “An ongoing series by Shawn Gilmore, initially appearing on tumblr, collecting all known appearances of “narrative string theory” (string walls, walls and floors littered with paperwork by obsessives, etc.).”

📣 From FARC To Beer Brewing: Ruben’s Story (4-min watch) 📣
One from our archives. For Experian several years ago, we filmed this story of an ex-FARC guerrilla fighter who, after the truce with the Colombian government, turned over a new leaf and started a microbrewery. Remains one of my favourite projects we’ve done.

💌 Humans of LinkedIn

Welcome back to the section where we highlight interesting people saying interesting things on LinkedIn. This week, I spotted a post from Nicole German, Global CMO of HSBC, who shared a video of a podcast interview between Nicole Parlapiano, CMO of Tubi, and Seth Matlins, Forbes CMO Network MD on ‘The CEO’s Guide to Marketing’.

“Marketing’s job ultimately is to create demand for your products or services.”

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

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