Hello hello,

Hugh and I will be heading to Cannes soon for the Cannes Lions festival, where we are going to produce our first daily podcast in partnership with UK Advertising with dispatches from the ground, ably supported from afar by Chris Mitchell, our podcast producer. If you’d like to say hello there or talk to us about work, give us a shout!

A couple of fundraising projects by friends in honour of their mums: Kevin Maguire wrote this touching piece in The New Fatherhood with a link to donate to The Good Life Orphanage that his mum set up in Kenya, and Mark Hadfield is running the Great North Run fundraising for the British Heart Foundation in memory of his mother.

That’s the Friday bell gone. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll see you next week!

Anjali

A Risk Model for Media (5-min read)

How To Talk So Language Models Will Listen (16-min watch)

Ministry of Imagination Manifesto (PDF download)

Get The Message: The Attention Pattern Spectrum (7-min read)

Telstra Launches 26 Stop Motion Ads Starring Aussie Wildlife (multiple videos)

Playbrary.AI: Making Reading A Game (AI-enabled game/tool)

Billy Oppenheimer’s SIX at 6: Notes on Taste (7-min read)

OMG! Winston Churchill and the Origin of the Acronym (2-min read)

Austin Kleon’s Studio Gear (4-min read)

Disordered Attention: Sarah Moroz In Conversation With Claire Bishop (9-min read)

Phoenixed: Inside Canada’s Payroll Disaster
Our first investigative podcast for the Global Payroll Association looks at the Canadian government’s botched payroll transformation project — a $3 billion problem that still hasn’t been resolved.

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. Here are 2 reasons to get in touch. 

1. “I don’t know what to do” – You’ve been creating content but it’s not having the impact you need. Talk to us about our Content Audit Workshop. 2. “I need something making” – You know what you want to make but need an agency to make it. We can help make your podcast, video, publication, animation and newsletter. We do other things too. Get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

A Risk Model for Media (5-min read)
We talk about the Attention Pattern Spectrum a lot (more on that below) - this post uses an analogy of investment portfolios while talking about media plans, with attention as the currency: “The theory is buyers have high-risk assets like sponsorships and seemingly low-risk assets like outcomes and revenue sharing. It’s an interesting analogy to unpack because you can start to see metrics along a spectrum of risk shared between media buyers and sellers.”

How To Talk So Language Models Will Listen (16-min watch)
Friend of Storythings Noah Brier runs the BrXnd.AI conference in New York, and he’s just released the video of a talk Tim Hwang gave at this year’s conference in May. It’s a look at how language models have inherited a lot of human foibles, and what that tells us about the future of technology.

Ministry of Imagination Manifesto (PDF download)
A lot of countries across the world go to the polls this year - India has just finished theirs; the incumbent Prime Minister got another term, but in a victory of democracy delivered a huge shock to the ruling party as they squeaked through with a massively reduced margin - and here in the UK we are not far off our own election in less than a month. This manifesto polls guests from the ‘What If To What Next’ podcast (including Brian Eno and Kate Haworth) about policies they think should be brought into being. The result is 600 inspiring policies covering everything from free art materials to Universal Basic Income and companies having to list all their failures as well as their successes in annual reports.

Get The Message: The Attention Pattern Spectrum (7-min read)
Our own Matt Locke on something we discuss a lot with clients (and a precursor to the Risk Model for Media article above, in many ways - so feel free to go and read that one again after you read this!): the Attention Pattern Spectrum. It traces the history of audience attention, and what that means for current audience attention patterns. If you work in communications in any form, you’ll want to read this.

Telstra Launches 26 Stop Motion Ads Starring Aussie Wildlife (multiple videos)
A beautiful set of stop motion videos by Telstra, created by Bear Meets Eagle on Fire in partnership with its sister agency +61 in Australia. The ads are whimsical and fun, and highlight Telstra’s credentials as the nation’s most reliable network in an entertaining way. More from Creative Review: “The films were directed by Jeff Low, who solicited the expertise of animation director Tobias Fouracre, known for his work on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs. There’s an everyday Creature Comforts charm about the clips, which manage to elevate naturalistic dialogue – and what is essentially a dry topic – into joyful vignettes.”

Playbrary.AI: Making Reading A Game (AI-enabled game/tool)
If you like reading and you like experimenting with fun AI tools, you’ll have a ball with this one. Go on, we dare you to!

Billy Oppenheimer’s SIX at 6: Notes on Taste (7-min read)
Billy Openheimer’s Six at 6 tells us six very short stories all linked by the theme of taste and how taste is the governor of choices and responses, day in and day out. Here’s Aaron Sorkin on a choice that changed his life: “there was this one night where I was staying in this very, very tiny studio apartment. It was a Friday night, one of those nights in New York City where it just feels like everybody has been invited to a party you haven’t been invited to…The only thing to do was to put a piece of paper in that typewriter and start typing. Out of pure boredom, I stayed up all night writing, and I feel like that night has never ended, like I’m still in that night.”

OMG! Winston Churchill and the Origin of the Acronym (2-min read)
The first online usage of O.M.G. came on a Usenet forum about soap operas in 1994,, but the origins stretch back to much earlier times.

Austin Kleon’s Studio Gear (4-min read)
This is a must for anyone obsessed with stationery, office set-ups or ways of working. Illustrator, artist, poet and author Austin Kleon lists everything he uses to do his job, including the kinds of notebooks, pens, pencils, ink and tech he uses. By the way, if you like this kinda thing you will LOVE Uses This.

Disordered Attention: Sarah Moroz In Conversation With Claire Bishop (9-min read)
I wasn’t going out searching for attention-related stories this week, I promise! This conversation with Claire Bishop, Professor of Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, and author of the book Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art and Performance Today, is fascinating. The whole thing is well worth your time. An excerpt: “In this book, attention is understood not as a universal, deep-rooted faculty of the human mind, but as a capacity that is mutable,” Bishop writes. That mutability—“hybrid attention”—is something to accept, rather than feel sheepish about. Bishop notes that she switches rapidly between different modes of attention while at an exhibition: “I’ll get lost in long periods of focus and presence. But I’ll also scan the QR code to read the exhibition booklet later… I take installation shots and a few close-ups. I respond to my partner’s texts about childcare. I photograph the labels….This perpetual oscillation between here and elsewhere, consuming and commenting, is central to how we look at art and performance today.”

We hope you've enjoyed this week’s newsletter. Pass it on to some of your non-subscriber friends - sharing would be really appreciated.

Thanks for reading. Till next week!

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