Top of the day to you folks,

A busy week chez Storythings, which is always a good place to be. In the UK, Peppa Pig got a baby sister called Evie - the parents of toddlers amongst you will know the importance of that fact, but for the marketers: is she the next billion-dollar brand?!

We ran a successful event with the Directors Charitable Foundation this week featuring Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Ignite and Propolis. If you’re a London or Manchester-based CMO or marketing lead who’d like to speak to an audience of talented film and TV directors about your approach to content, please get in touch with us to be considered as a speaker for future events.

Our Audio Producer Chris was also at The Podcast Show in London this week, where he spoke on The Creator Stage about the state of the podcast industry. We’re going to be releasing a new video format on our LinkedIn page soon that Chris is helming, so keep an eye out for that!

That’s it for now - enjoy our tastefully curated selection of links below, and also your weekend!

Anjali

The Onion’s Ben Collins Knows How To Save Media (18-min read)

German Fashion Brand Armedangels Translates “The Power of Facts Into a Visual Language” (3-min read)

Neal Stephenson Uses The Animal World As An Illustration Of How Humans Should Think And Work With AI (11-min read)

Focussing Too Much On Attribution Leads Advertisers Into A Doom Loop (2-min read)

No One Actually Knows Why AI Works (10-min watch)

Broadway’s TV Revival (4-min read)

What If Artists Were Your Strategic Weapon In The Boardroom? (11-min read)

Channel 4’s AI Principles (3-page PDF)

B2B Prototyping: How To Collaborate (8-min read)

Pikapocalypse: AI As An Escape From A Post-Apolcalyptic World (2-min video)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

The Onion’s Ben Collins Knows How To Save Media (18-min read)
Starting with a long one but a very good one, an interview in Vanity Fair. Ben Collins, former NBC News reporter, bought satirical news site The Onion last year with Twilio founder Jeff Lawson. And he’s trying to reinvent media by keeping it alive in multiple ways perhaps only a publication like The Onion can in this day and age of declining responsible media: “He’s invested resources into video content, relaunching parody television news network “ONN” (Onion News Network) on YouTube and—in a shocking move for any online publication in this day and age—he’s also brought back The Onion’s print arm, which initially folded in 2013.” It’s a really good ‘un.

German Fashion Brand Armedangels Translates “The Power of Facts Into a Visual Language” (3-min read)
It’s not often an organisation like the Wikimedia Foundation collaborates with a fashion brand (indeed, the last collaboration they did was in 2018), but given the gravity of the work they do - they are after all ‘the world’s largest freely accessible online encyclopaedia’ - I really like this capsule collection. The designs also have QR codes that give customers open-sourced information on subjects like climate change and sustainable fashion.

Neal Stephenson Uses The Animal World As An Illustration Of How Humans Should Think And Work With AI (11-min read)
This is a different perspective on working with AI from speculative fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who spoke at a private event in New Zealand on the topic of AI recently. He encourages us to look to the animal world for inspiration on how to establish a position of authority in an ecosystem with creatures of different kinds of intelligence - and how we might able to preserve and advance our own intelligence in the light of advancing LLM’s.

Focussing Too Much On Attribution Leads Advertisers Into A Doom Loop (2-min read)
Via Ben Young’s newsletter, a LinkedIn piece by Peter Buckley, Connections Planning Director at Meta, who writes about the pitfalls of over-investing in online ad spend. In short, when you focus too much on Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) you quietly ‘undermine performance’. There are also some other good references, like WARC’s Multiplier Effect paper and the now often-told cautionary tale about Nike. This is something we discuss with clients a lot.

No One Actually Knows Why AI Works (10-min watch)
This is one of those videos that is a great example of democratising access to a subject, which funnily enough is a theme of a client project I’m working on. It explains how we as humans know how AI works, but not why, even as some capabilities (like summarising a document) just seem to appear in LLMs after a certain amount of use. The content creator (great merch by the way) also explains why the distinction is important: if we want to truly innovate, we need to actually understand why it is happening. Most of the work in this area is currently being led by Anthropic.

Broadway’s TV Revival (4-min read)
One type of media getting a new lease of life in another always piques my interest (see: The Onion + YouTube/print in Link One above), so this piece that points to many examples of Broadway shows getting new distribution online through the likes of CNN, Disney, Netflix, PBS and more in the US is worth going through.

What If Artists Were Your Strategic Weapon In The Boardroom? (11-min read)
A really thought-provoking read that breaks down the role of the artist as a strategic operator in an organisation, with examples of people and companies using this method of innovation (haven’t seen a mention of Minority Report and Apple veteran designer John Underkoffler in a while!), some of the job titles being used for people in this role, and how to really get the best out of hiring and working with them: “In complexity, efficiency alone fails. What’s needed is cognitive looseness, systems fluency and narrative agility. And artists bring all three.”

Channel 4’s AI Principles (3-page PDF)
Channel 4 lead the way on a lot of things (this week they became the first UK broadcaster to bring video programming to Spotify), but they’re also known for their process toolkits and manifestos, many of which have guided us at Storythings. This AI Principles crib sheet is a useful summary of how and why they deploy AI - their position that ‘AI is here to support human creativity, not replace it’ is an important stance that we second.

B2B Prototyping: How To Collaborate (8-min read)
Matt has written part 2 of a series looking at how B2B organisations can create the conditions for content prototyping, and then successfully execute on them (which is what we do as a business, and he’s done a lot of in the past at the BBC, so he’s talking from solid experience!). What he says about rhythms, or the ‘cadences and forces that shape the way you do work’ are a valuable reminder to anyone working in marketing to remember that executing good content in the long-term is not the same as making one campaign for Christmas.

Pikapocalypse: AI As An Escape From A Post-Apolcalyptic World (2-min video)
Matt shared a link to an AI assistant in last week’s newsletter and said it was ‘equally fascinating and a bit ick’, and I have to say that is what I felt after seeing this video as well. It’s ostensibly an ad for Jared Leto-backed AI startup Pika, but it is definitely disturbing. Aimée from Storythings said she thought she was watching a Black Mirror ad - also a good comparison!

Thanks for getting this far, always. We love hearing about how dedicated our newsletter readers are. In return, another bit of trivia: did you know that today, May 23rd, was the day the classic Jack Nicholson-starrer The Shining was released in 1980? We have a few The Shining fans at Storythings, so I thought that might be interesting for more of you!

Till next time!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI