Lists, Fairy Tales and the 90s

Hey all,

Last week we published the final part of our report Scroll Stoppers: six ways hybrid working is changing attention. We produced it in partnership with Young Minds, a mental health charity for young people. If you’re interested in hearing more about the new ways Gen Z engages with content, you might want to check this bonus piece Gen Z Say What. If you want to go deep there’s a reading list, quotes, and plenty of data. To make it easier to read we published the report in six parts. For those who prefer long reads, you can now download the entire thing. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you need help with your content strategy, our Audience Insight Team would love to help you. Do you need bespoke research to help you understand your audience and how they organise their attention? We can do an evaluation of your existing content and format strategies, and how you can make them more effective. Or we can do audience strategy playbooks: more than just a strategy report, we use our decades of experience in the media to give you practical next steps and actions. Get in touch if you’d like to talk.

Hugh

David Ogilvy Outlines His Weaknesses (List)

Rihanna’s Superbowl Ad (90 sec watch)

Just Keep the Pen Moving (4 min read)One Year: The Day the Music Stopped (50 min listen)How Fairy Tales Break All the Rules (7 min read)Formats Unpacked: Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3 (6 min read)Humour, Ads and Repetition (4 min read)How a 1937 Movie Pulls Off This Incredible Special Effect (5 min read)It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive (14 min read)

Steve Coogan on the Making of 24 Hour Party People (5 min read)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Bristol, 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? (eg newsletters, podcasts, publications, or video series).3. Production - Do you need help developing and running an existing or new content format, and growing loyal audiences around them?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

David Ogilvy Outlines His WeaknessesI love this so much that I’m going to do my own and encourage the other Storythings directors to do so, too. It’s a nice way of helping people in the organisation feel less intimidated, recognise that we all make mistakes and that it’s OK to do many things they may think they can’t. Reminds me of the BRILLIANT GDS It’s OK to posters. (Via Chicken Shed Chronicles)(List)

Rihanna’s Superbowl Ad (90 sec watch)Rihanna grew up in Bridgetown, Barbados. Once called Westbury New Road, her street was renamed Rihanna Drive in 2017. Speaking at the renaming ceremony Rihanna said “My whole life was shaped on this very road. I was just a little island girl riding bikes, running around barefoot and flying kites in the cemetery, but I had big dreams. Dreams that were born and realized right here.”(90 sec watch)Just Keep the Pen MovingRussell Davies is writing a Do Interesting book. It’ll be a very good book and an important book to read if you’re interested in how to build your creative muscles. After all, many years ago Russell wrote that a way to be interesting is to be interested. And more than 60 years ago James Webb Young said “Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject he could not easily get interested in...Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.” Here Russell talks about how morning pages are great for “clearing the drainpipes.”(4 min read)One Year: The Day the Music StoppedThis episode of the 99% Invisible podcast tells the story of how musicians banned recording for an entire year in protest to new technologies that were threatening their livelihoods. What turned out to be one of the most consequential labor actions of the 20th century coincided with an underground revolution in music led by artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.(50 min listen)How Fairy Tales Break All the RulesThe wonderful Jason Kottke pointed me in the direction of this great piece on how all the rules you are taught about storytelling are turned on their head for fairy tales: “Instead of ‘show don’t tell,’ fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding ‘round characters,’ fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical ‘worldbuilding,’ fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting ‘in media res,’ they start ‘once upon a time.’ Instead of ‘telling the story only you can tell,’ fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.”(7 min read)Formats Unpacked: Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3Whenever I write a Formats Unpacked that isn’t a podcast, video or TV show I worry that no one will be interested. Typically they become the ones that get the most engagement. This week I talked about songs that are written as lists and wonder why there aren’t more list formats in podcasts when they are so many successful TV and magazine list formats. (6 min read)Humour, Ads and RepetitionPaddy Gilmore uses a wonderful Seinfeld scene and a 1980 FedEx ad to help us understand why it is that certain kinds of humour can survive repeat viewing in ads whilst others can’t. (4 min read)

How a 1937 Movie Pulls Off This Incredible Special EffectI love hearing stories like this. Watch the video and follow the Twitter thread to get the answer and see how it was used in other films of the era. (5 min read)It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be AliveThey weren’t. But hey, I’m an 80s child what do you expect me to say? Still. There’s some good stuff in here: “All of life is a spoiler, and today’s kids get to experience nothing with virgin eyes…I feel bad for the young people who have never been able to sit quietly with a song or movie or book, outside of the cacophony of other people’s opinions about it. And I feel sorry for myself for spending so much of my life impatiently waiting to get to the next part, to the next inevitable disappointment. When everything you experience arrives predigested, nothing feels like it’s yours, and everything feels rushed.”(14 min read)Steve Coogan on the Making of 24 Hour Party PeopleI liked this about working with Michael Winterbottom: “The way Michael shot was a revelation. I never had to hit a mark or find a light. There was a lot of improvisation. The only people on set were Michael, the director of photography Robby Müller and the sound guy, the three of them in a huddle that would just move around the room. I would frequently do scenes and not know where the camera was. It was a little creative epiphany for me. Working with Michael was free-form, it was about not over-engineering something. Comedy is quite a safe place to be if you get the laugh, but Michael taught me not to do the joke. Embrace the tension, the awkwardness.”(5 min read)

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.