How to Stand Out, Deck Inspiration and Staying Curious

Hey all,

Just one big thing from us this week:

One Big Thing - We're running a new half-day workshop about developing branded content formats in partnership with our good friend The Content Technologist. The workshop will be in New York on Tuesday 26th September. It will cover understanding and measuring audience attention, developing branded content formats, getting your workflow right, and measuring success. Join us.

If you’re not in New York but would like to hear more about how we help brands with their content strategy and production just reply to this email. We’d love to show you the many ways we’ve helped our clients become world-class storytellers.

Enjoy this week’s stories and have a most excellent weekend.

Hugh

An Incredibly Powerful Newspaper Front Page (1 min read)

The Origin of “Survival of the Fittest” (6 min read)

How to Remain Curious (4 min read)

50 of the Weirdest Most Wonderful Corners of the Web (list)

Hallucinations For Fun and Profit (20 min watch)

If You Want to Stand Out Be a Non-Conformist (5 min read)

Routine and the Purpose of Art (1 min read)

Are You in Need of Deck Design Inspiration? (resource)

Formats Unpacked: Drawful (6 min read)

Fix My Setup (1 min watch)

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. 

An Incredibly Powerful Newspaper Front PageThe day after another school shooting, the Daily Tar Heel published this front page consisting of text messages sent between the students locked down on campus and their loved ones. It’s so powerful!

The Origin of “Survival of the Fittest”After reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” as a shorthand for Darwin’s theory of evolution. The phrase has been misused ever since as justification for corporate takeovers, wars, and struggles for power in the workplace and on the playground. Billy Oppenheimer tells six short stories about Forrest Gump, Lionel Messi, Indiana Jones and Jerry Seinfeld that illustrate its true meaning.

How to Remain CuriousThis is a great read from Ash Mann on how the culture sector is full of curious people but they struggle to remain curious when the pace of change is exponentially increasing, whilst at the same time resources are reducing. This results in them feeling overwhelmed and defaulting to work in a way that feels controlled.

50 of the Weirdest, Most Wonderful Corners of the WebIt’s not uncommon for me to complain about the loss of weirdness in internet culture. Everything has gotten so serious over the last decade and the pre-social media eclecticism has almost disappeared. Thankfully, the Guardian has produced this list of weird places on the web you all should visit.

Hallucinations For Fun and ProfitBrXnd is a really interesting organisation that sits at the intersection between brands and AI. They help the world of marketing and AI connect and collaborate through events like their NYC event this video was recorded at. Here, Tim Hwang talks about how tools like ChatGPT tend to "hallucinate", providing confident answers to questions that have little bearing on reality. This has typically been considered a weakness of the technology, and something that poses a major problem to practical business use. Tim argues the opposite: that hallucinations are not only the most powerful characteristic of this technology but the characteristic most likely to radically reshape how marketing works.

If You Want to Stand Out Be a Non-ConformistThis piece is full of great studies that illustrate how being distinctive will make you more memorable to your customers. Interestingly, the final example suggests that non-conformity not only gets your attention but will make people rate you higher: “Several experiments have demonstrated this effect. In a 2014 study, Gino asked 159 respondents to rate the status and competence of a professor, based on a short description. Participants were randomly assigned to hear one of two descriptions, in which the professor either conforms (‘he typically wears a tie to work and is clean-shaven’) or doesn’t (‘he typically wears a T-shirt to work and has a beard’). Gino found the nonconformist professor was rated as 14% more competent than the conformist.”

Routine and the Purpose of ArtSomewhat connected to the piece on curiosity above, I like this quote from Ursula K. Le Guin on routine and art.

Are You in Need of Deck Design Inspiration?Cast your eyes over some of these beauties before you start building your next Powerpoint.

Formats Unpacked: DrawfulIt’s always good when someone asks us if they can unpack a game for Formats Unpacked. When we started it I thought we’d have a lot more games than we have. This week, Ben Templeton unpacks a drawing game that gets you voting on your friend’s creative response to prompts. Get in touch if you’d like to unpack a favourite format.

Fix My Setup This format, featuring mini-tutorials that help you fix your video setup, is a great piece of content marketing from Wistia. I came across it via the Creative Mornings newsletter and by including it in my newsletter I can pretty much guarantee one of our thousands of subscribers will include it in their newsletter. There are three reasons I like it:

1. The content is really useful

2. The format is tight and everything you need to know is explained in 60 seconds

3. The graphics are really nice

If you need help creating content formats like this we’d love to help you. Just hit the button below and we’ll arrange a call.

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.