This week I attended the B2B Ignite conference in London, which was a great way to get to know things that are top of mind for B2B marketers. Yes AI featured, but the mood was largely positive. It is enabling more analysis to be done more quickly - B2B Marketing used Claude to analyse 1000+ submissions from their award entries over the years, and found that consumer-grade entertainment is winning more often than not. British Hockey Olympic gold medallist Helen Richardson-Walsh gave a rousing speech on the importance of building a great culture in order to cultivate high-performing teams, which was apt given the current football World Cup, which we then gathered to watch after the conference - fortunately England won that match!

Matt is running a B2B Content Format survey. All you need to do is watch 5 quick social videos and give your opinion on them. No right or wrong answers - please and thank you!

I don’t do this often but if you have 2 minutes to spare, I’d also really appreciate a vote in the Technology for Marketing Awards, which has a deadline of today for the public vote. Thank you again!

💻 DATA POINT: Creative Boom surveyed nearly 900 creative professionals (mostly US and UK) and 69% said they experienced burnout in some form this year. Only 10% are positive about the impact of AI on the industry. Awards have not been a priority: 80% have not entered an award in the past year.

No Web Without Women (collection of resources in a website)

In Defense of Content (5-min read)

Silly Little Plastic Cat: A Back Market Film (12-min watch)

The Onion’s Infowars Parody Is Here. Alex Jones Is Going To Hate It (8-min read)

Recapture The Creative Spark Of Childhood With Austin Kleon (8-min read)

How Time And Others Are Rebuilding Parts Of The Web For AI Agents (6-min read)

Wiki Spy (fun visual Wikipedia-based site)

Anatomy Of A Logo: Milton Glaser’s I ❤️NY (4-min read)

Ben & Jerry’s Maintains A Flavor Graveyard Of Discontinued Ice-Cream Products (2-min read and link to microsite)

📣 There Is Something In The Water (14-min read) 📣

No Web Without Women (collection of resources in a website)
A fantastic website that tells you what the internet might be like without the work of some inspiring women. I love how they’ve categorised it by technology. Some of the women are well-known (yay Ada Lovelace!), some are less so - all of them are brilliant. HT Ash Mann.

In Defense of Content (5-min read)
Francis Zierer with a great analysis on the difference between good content and the container it comes in (i.e TikTok, Instagram, insert your platform of choice here). He uses some very strong language which is worth a read: “Any one TikTok or Reel viewed in isolation has a different meaning than it does when viewed deep in a one-hour brainrot session. The meaning of any one piece withers under volume. Content is art stripped of individuality in the violence of a crowd.”

Silly Little Plastic Cat: A Back Market Film (12-min watch)
Matt shared this lovely short brand documentary about hundreds of Garfield phones that washed up on the shores of France in the 1980s - and are still making an appearance there. It talks about overconsumption in the modern age and how we should think about ‘reuse, repair and recycle’ as a mantra to save our planet more often than we truly do. It remains so true in spirit to what Back Market does, which is refurbish tech, and that’s why it’s a great piece of brand work. If you liked that, also see the podcast we made for the Science Museum a while back: A Brief History of Stuff, and some of our stories about recycling and sustainability for Futures in Draft.

The Onion’s Infowars Parody Is Here. Alex Jones Is Going To Hate It (8-min read)
The Onion launched their parody of far-right site Infowars, Alex Jones’ erstwhile media empire, even as they’re still trying to buy it out of bankruptcy. A new episode will be streamed on YouTube, Twitch and Instagram every Thursday at 8pm ET under @realinfowars. The first episode ran last night. The Onion plans to give $100,000 from merch sales to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, which Alex Jones called a ‘hoax’. More from this Wired piece: “Tim Heidecker remains the creative director (and Jones impressionist) for the project, continuing in his mission to turn Infowars into a home for gonzo experimental comedy that lampoons internet culture and, of course, the fever dreams of America’s crazed political commentators.”

Recapture The Creative Spark Of Childhood With Austin Kleon (8-min read)
Author, artist and newsletter writer Austin Kleon recently launched his latest book ‘Don't Call It Art’. Here, he speaks to Wendy MacNaughton on how adults need to think more like kids to get the best out of their thinking.

How Time And Others Are Rebuilding Parts Of The Web For AI Agents (6-min read)
We covered the news of The Economist publishing AI-friendly versions of their content a while ago, for better search visibility. Here, a deeper look at how more publishers are trying to work with AI search engines instead of ignoring them.

Wiki Spy (fun visual Wikipedia-based site)
Matt shared this and I went ‘Ah, another neat Neal site!’. Neal Agrawal is back with another fun internet project. This one is basically Wikipedia in visual form, on steroids. Go and have fun. Much better than losing yourself in an Instagram algorithm for hours.

Anatomy Of A Logo: Milton Glaser’s I ❤️NY (4-min read)
A history lesson on the invention and evolution of the I ❤️ NY logo. Did you know that it was created in the mid-1970s, but it was the mid-1990s by the time the state of New York got a copyright, which to date earns it tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees a year?

Ben & Jerry’s Maintains A Flavor Graveyard Of Discontinued Ice-Cream Products (2-min read and link to microsite)
This particular Ben & Jerry’s site isn’t new (the site launched in 1997!), but I’m including it because it’s a great archive. It also reminded me of a format I saw at the B2B Ignite conference this week which involved marketers ‘eulogising’ campaigns they’d worked on that failed spectacularly. Unfortunately, the live format didn’t quite work, though they brought a bit of theatre to it and did their best. Not all graveyard formats are created equal!

📣 There Is Something In The Water (14-min read) 📣
I particularly love this piece because it is written by a friend, so I’m biased, but it’s also a great piece of writing about a community coming together to save one of the most well-known spaces in Bangalore, India - Sankey Water Tank. I hope you’ll finish wanting to contribute to your community in some way.

Suzanne Seitinger, VP Product Marketing at CoreWeave, on the importance of teams trying things in the age of AI. She starts with the fable of the 4 animals who wanted to become the musicians of Bremen, and moves on to…AI innovation. There is a decent thread linking the two, I promise!

READ SUZANNE’S POST >

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