B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Welcome to Friday!
This week the Storythings team had our annual Away Day. We took the opportunity to visit the Music Is Black: A British Story exhibition at the V&A East (recommend), and wandered around the archives of the V&A East Storehouse (an absolute treasure trove of objects from around the world). We could have spent hours more in the Storehouse in particular. It reminded us of the value of curation and archives, both things we speak about a lot, and for good reason. Bringing together a curated collection of work (like in this newsletter!) is an art. And building a solid archive of content is becoming more and more important as AI reads content depth to see how trustworthy you are before surfacing your content to others. If this is something you think about, we’d love to chat.
Congratulations to Storythings’ own Christopher Mitchell, one half of Breaking Atoms, who won Silver in the British Podcast Awards last night! 👏👏👏
💻 DATA POINT: The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford has brought out a report about the changing definition of news in a digital environment, looking at six countries (Argentina, Norway, Japan, Spain, the US and UK). They make a distinction between the traditional core definition of news (long-form text and video sources by traditional news outlets) and a core-expanded definition (social media, podcasts, and short-form video sometimes packaged as commentary, debate and satire). Unsurprisingly, content that sits at the ‘edge’ of news can elicit more engagement ‘through explanatory, conversational, or creator-led formats, helping some audiences stay informed, but also raising new questions about quality and trust.’
📕The Short Story
The Diary Of A CEO - Audited (data visualisation)
The Bayeux Tapestry Online (online experience)
When Culture Becomes “Content” (16-min read)
I Asked Claude To Show Me The Inside Of Its Own Mind (2-min watch)
Video Podcasts Are The New Late Night (9-min read)
“Cash Only”, A Film About New York’s Iconic Punjabi Deli (7-min watch)
Most TV Is Just This Now (2-min watch)
Attention, like crude oil, is treated like a scarce natural resource that must be extracted, processed, and refined.
I am tempted to say that plastic is the spirit animal of content. Like plastic, content can be mass-produced to a degree that is virtually boundless and is typically created as a derivative of something else. And it slowly but surely pollutes and poisons the environments in which it is most used.
📚 The Long Story
‘Ask For What You Want’ Is A Key Skill Of The 21st Century (17-min read)
Some of you might have already come across this, as it’s been widely shared, but it’s worth including here nevertheless. We’re fans of Robin Sloan’s work, and here he writes about his experience creating an AI agent, and how he’s benefited. Not to go all AI-preachy on you, but it’s worth reading about how, through experience and observing the LLM’s working with him, he can really see the change in the field in the course of one year.
The Diary Of A CEO - Audited (data visualisation)
Steven Bartlett is a very divisive character, but I encourage you to set that aside and look at the data about his podcast that this independent analysis aggregates. From a comparison of how many episodes were business-focussed vs. health-focussed, to experiments with thumbnails over the 6 years it’s been running, there is some interesting data there.
The Bayeux Tapestry Online (online experience)
Shout-out to the British Museum team who reached out to us to let us know about this online version of the famed Bayeux Tapestry, the physical version of which is currently on show at the museum in the UK for the first time since it was made 1,000 years ago. The online experience, built by the museum and digital agency Numiko, is ‘a way for people of all ages and abilities, wherever they are in the world, to get close to every detail along this 70-metre-long masterpiece. If you can't see it in real life, this is the next best thing.’ For how complex it is, the digital experience meets high accessibility standards.
When Culture Becomes “Content” (16-min read)
Artist, writer and publisher Paul Chan writes about art as a reflection of reality in an age of monetized attention and generative AI. He reflects on something a 15-year-old told him about culture being predominantly online, and asks whether things that cannot be made into content online are worth pursuing. Yes. Yes, they are.
I Asked Claude To Show Me The Inside Of Its Own Mind (2-min watch)
A Reddit user asked Claude to use Opus 5.5 to generate a video, digital backrooms-style, that represented the inside of its mind. The prompt was pretty good, with some comments saying the video is heavily inspired by the Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.
Video Podcasts Are The New Late Night (9-min read)
This piece caught my attention for a few reasons: I actually listen to Amy Poehler’s The Good Hang podcast and quite enjoy it, and we’ve been having a few discussions at Storythings about how video podcasts are indeed the only way to podcast going forward. This piece compares hosts of talk show-style podcasts to the hosts of TV’s late-night slots: “Poehler and Rogan and Klein and O’Brien are all working in the very familiar televisual mode of the talk show. No longer merely an aping of NPR-style interview programming, these shows are tapping into their inner PBS.”
The Creator Economy’s Stance On AI Is Shifting - Again (4-min read)
Creators are using AI in their workflows a lot more than ever before - but is that within the permissible ‘use of AI’ realm? Some clients aren’t happy with it. Great question from Billion Dollar Boy’s CMO Becky Owen: “Will it start to pull apart the kinds of careerists that are built for volume and cash grab and scale from those that are intentional and thoughtful and true?”
“Cash Only”, A Film About New York’s Iconic Punjabi Deli (7-min watch)
I’ve been to this deli, and it really is iconic. Meals for less than $10 (even today), the same legendary owner-founder-operator it’s had since launch, and an impending end to its story. Aside from that, the gritty black-and-white film, great music and voiceover, and the first-person style visual storytelling make it a great watch, and this conversation with the makers a great read. Another fantastic release from We Present by We Transfer.
Most TV Is Just This Now (2-min watch)
If you’ve ever watched any of the popular British television shows from the 90’s or 2000’s (anything by David Attenborough, The Great British Bake-off, The Great British Sewing Bee, Grand Designs…) you’ll have a good old laugh here. You’re welcome. I know I needed a good laugh anyway!
📣 Nishma Patel Robb Crushes On Studio 54 (23-min listen/watch) 📣
Another fantastic episode of Creative Crush (yes we are biased, but listen to it and tell me you disagree about how great an episode it is!). Nishma Patel Robb, who spent 10 years at Google prior to launching Glittersphere and Switched ON, waxes lyrical about legendary nightclub Studio 54. She couldn’t have found a better person to chat to than our very own Hugh Garry either! On Monday October 5th, Nishma is running a free online session showing folks how she uses AI. If you’d like to join in, register here.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Via friend of Storythings Ash Mann, a post by Sophia Widmann, who runs Museum Booster in Berlin. She writes about Adrian Kingston’s Audience Impact Model as an indicator of the true impact of a flagship exhibition and/or its online experience. This reminded us of our recent work with Art UK on developing their FIRE model of audience attention. I like what Adrian says about ‘big dumb numbers’.
READ SOPHIA’S POST HERE>
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
