B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 The weekend is nearly here!
This week, I attended an interesting talk by Rishad Tobaccowala, previously of Publicis Groupe and now author and writer, about the seismic changes in the world of work, and how tools like AI can actually give an advantage to smaller agencies like Storythings. It was rather gratifying to hear it from someone who’s been on the inside and still regularly works with clients at huge juggernauts of businesses.
Storythings’ own Chris Mitchell was on the Audio Academy podcast with Bernard P. Achampong discussing their labour of love, the podcast Redemption Man, and turning a local legend into a compelling piece of audio storytelling. What Chris does not know about audio is not worth knowing about, so I recommend a listen!
💻 DATA POINT: This week’s ‘oh that’s interesting stat’: according to YouGov research, podcast advertising could be effective for brands who want to reach younger British women who are also avid users of Reddit. A few more stats: Reddit’s user base amongst women has increased from 11% to 19% in the last four years, and 85% of women who use Reddit are Gen Z or Millennials.
📕The Short Story
Firefox Reunites Meme Royalty To Remind You What The Internet Used To Feel Like (3-min read and 1-min watch)
Nathan Fielder Tells Us Everything (40-min read)
JD Sports + BBC Children In Need Create A Youth Club Dictionary (online book/site)
Headlines In Newspaper Archives About People Who Had The Same Name As A Future Famous Person (Bluesky Thread)
Inside London’s Strange New AI Art Scene (28-min read)
ARIatHome Raps With The Public While Getting His Hair Cut (YouTube livestream)
📣Dan Roche Crushes On Slow Horses (25-min listen/watch) 📣
Britain didn’t just spread capitalism, markets, and industrialism across the globe. It was also patient zero for these processes. And that early exposure arguably may have lent the nation some head start in developing ways of living with them: habits, theories, art. For some conditions, even if immunity doesn’t arrive, tolerance does. Perhaps that’s why Britain — despite its cultural stagnancy elsewhere in this young millennium — has nonetheless nurtured prophetic crosscurrents regarding AI’s aesthetic mutations. That is, simply because it industrialized first.
📚 The Long Story
The Unexplained Podcast Is Back on Friday The 13th (podcast)
This is for all your Halloween fans out there. Right in time for Halloween weekend, news that on November 13th, Friday, the next season of the Unexplained Podcast will be back (you have a few days left to wait!). Emma Greengrass from Storythings is a fan of ‘high strangeness’ and recommends this, so put it on your radar if you’re a fan of the creepy stuff too.
Firefox Reunites Meme Royalty To Remind You What The Internet Used To Feel Like (3-min read and 1-min watch)
When you first see something like this, you think ‘that’s very cool, didn’t we have some good times on the internet’, and then you realise so many people are talking about it, and it’s earned a place in this newsletter. Mozilla Chief Marketing Officer John Solomon commissioned this campaign that features meme stars of the early 2000’s internet, alongside the idea that privacy was a thing then and it still can be now, with Mozilla. Quite lovely.
Nathan Fielder Tells Us Everything (40-min read)
Matt shared this (of course he’s already booked his ticket for when You Can See Everything does come out in the UK!), and it’s a really incisive, engaging conversation between Wired’s Katie Drummond and the man himself, Nathan Fielder. So much has been said about this movie that all that remains is to watch it, and in advance of that, read this interview. Set aside some time this weekend.
JD Sports + BBC Children In Need Create A Youth Club Dictionary (online book/site)
Uncommon created this for JD Sports and BBC Children In Need in light of the stat that 1,200 youth clubs have closed in the UK since 2010. This book is a collection of their language, the ‘language that lives inside’. There is also a beautiful music video to a song called ‘My Home’ by DC3, inspired by the language found in the book, and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Andrea Arnold - also worth a watch.
Life Magazine, Chronicler of 20th Century America, Rises Again (4-min read)
Model and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss is bringing the acclaimed magazine, known for its visual storytelling, back to life after two decades. As Eve Lyons, their new Director of Photography, says: “We’re living in this extraordinary time where there’s an abundance of images, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re seeing more deeply. I think there is a lot of value in slowing down and making looking feel meaningful.”
Bonhams To Offer The Collection Of Stanley Kubrick (Auction)
Kubrick’s personal collection of props, scripts, equipment and personal possessions comes to auction by Bonhams in London in February 2027, and online. Directly from the Stanley Kubrick Archives, it will be preceded by a free public exhibition of the items from 18th January to 3rd February in London, with select items also available to view at Bonhams Los Angeles and Paris in November (with the New York exhibition having concluded last week). A feast for Kubrick fans, even if I personally will not be making an offer for’The Original Star Child Prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey (estimate: £600,000-800,000)’!
Headlines In Newspaper Archives About People Who Had The Same Name As A Future Famous Person (Bluesky Thread)
This is most amusing - thanks Matt for sharing, via Jason Kottke. Click through to marvel at the crazy things some people with names we recognise now, did back in the day, with some of their modern-day namesakes turning out to be equally eccentric!
Inside London’s Strange New AI Art Scene (28-min read)
Historian Thomas Moynihan chronicles how London’s art scene is changing, from robot dog fights to how Victorian workhouses producing ‘slop-work’ are not that different to how we use LLM’s to produce AI slop today. It’s an excellent, philosophical look at how history and technology are colliding, and well worth a read.
ARIatHome Raps With The Public While Getting His Hair Cut (YouTube livestream)
We might have covered ARIatHome before in this newsletter - he is an American improv musician, YouTuber and Twitch streamer (real name Ari Miller, son of Grammy-winning orchestral conductor David Miller) who carries a portable music rig and streams people coming up to him to jam. Matt let us know he was in Brixton, London a few weeks ago - here’s a very entertaining segment featuring him rapping while a barber focusses intently on giving him a haircut! I left the stream on for quite a while, it’s quite catchy…
📣Dan Roche Crushes On Slow Horses (25-min listen/watch) 📣
Time for another Creative Crush episode, folks - and this time we have Dan Roche, CMO of Workbooks, talking about his love for Apple TV’s Slow Horses. Hugh Garry and Dan unpack unlikely heroes, dysfunctional teams and why the best B2B marketing, much like the best spies, sometimes succeeds by breaking all the rules. Queue this one up on your podcast app of choice now!
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Megan Cunningham, founder of creator studio Magnet Originals, summarises a call she was on where Rachel Karten (of Link In Bio fame) chatted with Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s VP of Product, on the latter’s move to introducing longer-form reels. Some useful insights on why series are ‘a gold mine for the algorithm’. This is exactly what we say at Storythings (have been for years, though it’s only now Instagram are catching up, don’t blame us) - shout if you want us to help you create a B2B series!
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
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
