Lies, Hitchcock, and Editorial Strategy

Ten stories that have given us creative inspiration this week

Hey all,

I hope you’re all doing fine.

Hi to all the new subscribers that joined us this week thanks to our mentions in the Substack email. This newsletter comes to you from Storythings. We do content marketing for B2B and non-profits. We make podcasts, videos, editorial publications and newsletters. If you need help with audience engagement, content strategy or production then we are your people. What are you struggling with at the moment? We’d love to help.

Or if you are in New York we’re running our Beyond the Campaign workshop on Tuesday 26th September. Tell your boss that you want to join us.

Have a fantastic weekend and enjoy this week’s stories!

Hugh

The short story

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. 

How to Build An Editorial StrategyIt was nice to be invited by Substack to contribute to this series on creating a strategy for your content. Part 2 of the series is all about formats and why you should consider shifting from lots of one-off pieces of content to a format approach: “It’s hard enough getting attention for your newsletter, so when you get it, you want to hold it. That’s what formats do. They give your readers a reason to return before you’ve even decided what you are going to write next week or the week after.” 

Don’t Try to Be Interesting. DO InterestingIn the first of two book recommendations this week, Russell Davies’ Do Interesting looks at why interesting isn’t a personality type, but a set of habits and a way of seeing the world. Russell has been doing interesting things all his life, many of which are listed in this extract. When I read one of his blog posts on the subject almost 20 years ago I got in touch with him and asked if we could have a cup of tea. To this day, no one I know makes having a cup of tea more interesting than Russell. He has been a massive inspiration to me in my career and to Storythings. So buy his book then do something interesting.

Your Brand is Not Distinctive. Here’s What You Can Do About ItThis report from Ipsos is a useful crash course for brand owners, creatives, and strategists on how to make your brand more distinctive. It’s also full of lots of inspiration and enviable work from lots of brands and agencies.

World Illustration Award Winners 2023And if you do want to make your work more distinctive, spending time look at award winners and runners-up is never a bad thing. There is some lovely illustration here in a range of categories including Advertising, Book Covers, Editorial, Product and Packaging.

What You Can Learn From Apple’s HomepageIn the week that Apple launched its new iPhone, Defne Gencler has a look for Homepage Copy Audit. She makes some good points about what you can copy from Apple as well as mistakes you should not make. I really like this format. It’s nice and short, visual and delivers a lot of value for its target audience.

Two Frameworks For Communicating With Clarity and ConfidenceWhen you work with complex subjects, communicating with clarity becomes something you pay particular attention to. So it’s no surprise I’ve been a little bit obsessed with the incredible work of Ross Atkins. I’m really looking forward to reading his new book The Art of Explanation, and I enjoyed listening to him talk about his frameworks in this podcast.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media MetricsAs we're huge nerds about audience metrics at Storythings, we loved this piece by John Hermann, pointing out that the fragmentation of digital platforms has made it harder to trust their metrics, and as a result, how we see our audiences: "These strategies will eventually stop working for both specific firms and the tech and entertainment industries as a whole — each new metric and magic number further erodes the context necessary for understanding the next one, until nobody believes anything, and numbers — perhaps our most basic tools for describing the world — lose meaning"

Psycho and the End of the Continuously Showing MovieToday I learned that cinemas used to show continuous screened films that people would turn up to at any point in the movie. They would watch to the end and stay to watch the first part of the movie that they missed. Hitchcock wasn’t going to have any of that going on during screenings of The Birds, so he created rules for watching.

When It Comes to New Discoveries, ‘That’s Funny’ Is Better Than ‘Eureka’Isaac Asimov once said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” Find out how a TV producer used this to generate an idea for a long-running TV series.

Micky Dolenz Sings REM’s Shiny Happy PeopleI don’t know why this appeals so much. I’m not a mad fan of the song. But if I am going to listen to a version of it, it would be a version sung by the Monkee’s singer.

Yellow dividing line

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.

Reply

or to participate.