Happy Black Friday,

I hope Jeff delivered everything you wished for on this most special of days. To celebrate, here’s Bobby Fingers making a Jeff Bezos rowing boat. Weird, wonderful and worth a watch.

Matt has written a series over on looking at how the ways we’ve been getting audience attention is broken. In response to readers’ questions he’s provided some solutions for getting attention in the new era of discovery. The 5 rules are going to be published one at a time every day next week. Subscribe to Attention Matters and get them delivered direct to your inbox.

We’re currently working on a bunch of thought leadership podcasts. I’m really proud of the audio work we’ve produced over the years and I’m really excited about those we’re currently developing. Podcast series are a great tool for B2B marketing, and we’ve had great success using them to engage audiences with complex messages. If your content marketing strategy needs a rethink, perhaps a podcast might be what you need. Let’s chat and see if a series will help.

OK! I need to get back to making my own giant Jeff Bezos plasticine head. Have a great weekend and enjoy the links.

Hugh

A Stunning Show by Artist JR and Paris Opera (22 min watch)

Warhol Owns Pop and Other Brand Truths (4 min read)

To Unbundle or Not to Unbundle (4 min read)

The Stars of Peep Show Look Back 20 Years Later (10 min read)

Steven Johnson on Hobbies, AI Voices and Collaboration (6 min read)

Letters of Note: Thank You Mr President (3 min read)

Is This The World’s Highest Grossing Photograph (7 min read)

The History of Aids Activism As Told Through 5 T-Shirts (4 min read)

First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go (6 min read)

Fuzzy Feelings - Apple’s Holiday Film (3 min watch)

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. If your content isn’t getting the results you need, let us help you understand why. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Research – We help B2B brands understand modern attention patterns and how they can get more engagement with content.2. Content Strategy – We use our bespoke process to develop unique content formats that hold audience attention, build community, and increase brand salience.3. Content Production – We craft beautiful and diverse stories of impact that capture and hold attention using podcasts, videos, editorial, and newsletters. We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

A Stunning Show by Artist JR and Paris OperaThis is stunning in places and well worth a few minutes of your attention. “Paris Opera invited JR to offer a visual metamorphosis of the institution’s monumental façade. On the occasion of an unprecedented show choreographed by Damien Jalet, music by Thomas Bangalter, the curtain rose to reveal a performance with 154 dancers. Reminding the House's enduring commitment to creation and dance, the costume worn by Étoile dancer Amandine Albisson performing in the show was designed and made by CHANEL. The House also supported the design and fabrication of costumes for the 153 dancers.” (22 min watch)

Warhol Owns Pop and Other Brand TruthsAt Storythings, we have a name for people, brands or organisations that have chosen and committed to a different approach from their competitors, creating a body of work that singles them out in their field. We call them ‘Sector Superstars.’ Here, Anita Schillhorn looks at what brands can learn from artists like Warhol (who owns pop), Lichtenstein (who owns comics) and Munch (who owns despair). (4 min read)

To Unbundle or Not to UnbundleAsh Mann on how bundling, unbundling and ‘channel shifting’ can open up new opportunities for reaching and connecting with audiences: “To begin to think about how you might unbundle, rebundle, or channel shift in a meaningful way for your audiences you first need to have a clear understanding of value…It’s also worth considering what high value activities you undertaken that are prevented from scaling by physical limitations (the RA project mentioned above is an example of this, you can’t fit 40,000 people into the room for a life drawing class at the Royal Academy).” (4 min read)

The Stars of Peep Show Look Back 20 Years LaterFor fans of the show, this is a wonderful read for the weekend. Writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, actors David Mitchell and Robert Webb, and others discuss the making of a comedy show with a genius format: “We scripted it so you would only hear someone’s thoughts when you were in their point of view. The first cuts were like that. That didn’t work, and then we got a new editor – the brilliant Lucien Clayton – who was like, ‘You need to see someone’s face when they’re thinking something funny’. He helped create the grammar of the show through that one massive innovation.” (10 min read)

Steven Johnson on Hobbies, AI Voices and CollaborationSteven Johnson is my favourite writer in the field of innovation. His book ‘Where Ideas Come From’ has been one of the most important reads in my career. So he’s one of my go-to people when it comes to understanding how creators are working with AI in interesting ways. Here he talks about his hobby, using AI voices and collaborating with machines. We were lucky enough to work with Steven in the early days of Storythings and in this article he links to the video we made of his conversation with Brian Eno. (6 min read)

Letters of Note: Thank You Mr PresidentIt’s sixty years ago this week that JFK was shot. In the days that followed, Jacqueline Kennedy somehow found the poise to hand-write two extraordinary letters of gratitude. The first letter was to President Johnson and the second letter reached across the Iron Curtain to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Both are quite remarkable reads for different reasons. (3 min read)

Is This The World’s Highest Grossing PhotographShot in 1960, this photo of forty models posing in the window frames of derelict brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has become possibly the highest grossing photograph ever. (7 min read)

The History of Aids Activism As Told Through 5 T-ShirtsSocial media has entirely transformed how we protest. But at the height of the Aids crisis, it was left to queer activists to fight for visibility and advocacy using what was readily available – posters, placards, marches and the shirts on their backs. Russell Tovey’s We Move in Circles exhibition calls attention to this history comprising an archive of T-shirts and a documentary about David Robilliard, an artist and poet who died from an Aids-related illness in 1988. (4 min read)

First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go"Millennials are the last of the analog world, both of yesterday and tomorrow, the bridge between what was and what will be. Maybe this is where my hesitation takes root, and why it feels like there are no good apps left for socializing the way we used to. We were raised on a diet of chatrooms and Myspace. Our expression was devoutly digital. We signed up en masse because what we sought in the next frontier of adulthood, we slowly realized, was being actualized online. Friendster, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook were where we found community, honed our creative urges, and secured careers. In time, we used social media to remake civic life.” (6 min read)

Fuzzy Feelings - Apple’s Holiday FilmAfter last week’s excellent JD Sports holiday film which put their yellow plastic carrier back front and centre, this week we turn to a more traditional theme with a nice combination of video and stop-motion animation to tell a story of the value of looking at life through a different lens. (3 min watch)

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

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