Rejection Letters, Parody Adverts and Wrong Metaphors

Hey all,

Before this week’s stories, I wanted to point you toward a couple of things from ourselves and our friends.

First up, we’d like to speak to some women who are interested in astronomy for a project we are doing about the largest observatory on earth. And if you didn’t do it when we first posted, check out the wonderful STEM role model posters we made for a client in 2018. They’ve been downloaded over a million times.

Over on , Anubha Bhonsle talked to us about how she finds interesting stories and her motivations for sharing or subscribing to content formats.

Our friends over at Data.org have just released a new project on gender equity in data. Gender Lens: under/over shares the overlooked stories of underrepresented individuals to highlight the need for and benefit of gender diversity in data.

That’s enough from us for now. Enjoys this week’s stories.

Hugh

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair” (4 min read)

Why Personas Are Worthless For Marketing (3 min read)

The Incredible Oscar-Winning Story of a Forgotten Sports Star (22 min watch)

Formats Unpacked: Parody Adverts (5 min watch)

The Best Rejection Letter Ever (2 min watch)

The Internet of Maps and Oracles (8 min read)

Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling (3 min read)

A Thread of All Your Favourite Video Techniques in Gif Form (Thread)

Philomena Cunk on Immigration (3 min watch)

Ten Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking About (8 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. 

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair”In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to be elected to the United States Congress. I love this exhibition ‘Seat at the Table’ which is inspired by her quote and work towards creating a more inclusive democracy. You may remember Shirley’s campaign posters we shared in the newsletter last summer. (4 min read)

Why Personas Are Worthless For MarketingMatt Lerner spent $1 million on marketing segmentation to build personas whilst working for PayPal and claims it was a waste. Although it’s not as black and white as he suggests, we’ve never been a huge fan of personas at Storythings and follow a similar approach to Matt. He gives a really simple example of why the ‘jobs to be done’ line of questioning provides more value. It’s worth jumping into the comments to hear counterarguments and see a more nuanced debate. (3 min read)The Incredible Oscar-Winning Story of a Forgotten Sports StarI really love Rob Alderson’s newsletter. Every Friday a delightful short film drops into my inbox and is consumed alongside my Friday lunch. This week it's an absolutely delightful and wonderfully told story of The Queen of Basketball. I really liked this too from the interview with director Ben Proudfoot on setting his own standards: "The story was so good – and she was so good – it took a lot out of me as a filmmaker, because I was dissatisfied with anything that wasn’t A+. This was a once-in-a-lifetime story to come across so the hard stuff was all the cuts that were very good, that the New York Times would happily run, that would have got into film festivals – but they weren’t quite worthy of this story I felt. I specially seek out people for my team who are dissatisfied with things that are very good. It’s so easy to say, oh yeah that’ll work. That’s fine...Where everybody else would click publish, that’s the rough cut."(22 min watch)Formats Unpacked: Parody AdvertsAdverts that parody movies or movie genres have been around since the eighties. Maybe earlier. Irn-Bru has just launched a new campaign and this week John Oliver included a series of brilliantly low-budget parody ads by an Austin plumber on his show. So what is it about parody ads that make them so popular? The answer is the same thing that makes formats popular too. (5 min read)

The Best Rejection Letter Ever This letter reading from the Letters Live series brought a smile to my face. When Paul Devlin was in high school applying for a university place, he noticed a grammatical error in a rejection letter sent to him by Harvard. He had no choice but to reject their rejection. (2 min watch)

The Internet of Maps and OraclesOur very own Matt Locke has been writing again. This time it’s about the metaphors we use to describe AI: “The internet has never been an oracle, and the answers we can find have always been, and will always be, fuzzy. We are, again, building a new kind of map, one that, like the World Wide Web and Freebase before it, will give us new ways to understand, produce, and share knowledge. The people building new interfaces for these tools need to understand that, and help us see them as maps, not oracles.” (8 min read)

Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in StorytellingA group of researchers has succeeded in using “sophisticated computing power, natural language processing, and reams of digitized text,” to identify the six main arcs in storytelling. 1,737 English-language works of fiction between 10,000 and 200,000 words long were fed into a computer that plotted the emotional trajectory of the works. Find out what those arcs are. (3 min read)A Thread of All Your Favourite Video Techniques in Gif FormIf you make any sort of video you may want to bookmark this excellent resource. It’s a long thread of videos techniques that you’ll be familiar with but never known the name of. This thread is great if you need to articulate how elements of your video look to anyone who doesn’t know what a ‘central focus’, ‘speed distortion’ or a ‘camera flip’ is. (12 min read)Philomena Cunk on ImmigrationIn a week in which a British ex-footballer and TV presenter were doorstepped by the media for the crime of having an opinion on our government’s awful immigration policy, it feels right to share this fantastic clip from Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe from 2015. It’s packed with genius lines that highlight the dark use of language in the media around such issues and points out the hypocrisy of our leaders and media. (3 min watch)

Ten Charts I Can’t Stop Thinking AboutA nice set of counterintuitive or otherwise fascinating charts. (8 min read)

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend you can subscribe below and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

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

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