B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Hola friends!
It’s the first Friday in August - I hope the sun is shining wherever you are!
A reminder to please fill in this survey about where the friction lies in your creative workflow if you’re someone who commissions content regularly for an organisation. If you’re part of a network, Slack group or WhatsApp group that might have relevant people in it, please do share the survey - it won’t take more than 5-10 minutes. Thank you!
💻 DATA POINT: The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer's special report on Brand Growth makes a useful distinction that's easy to gloss over: trust and relevance aren't earned through "authenticity" as a vibe - they're earned through specific, checkable proof points. Edelman's own framing is that people, communities, experts, reviewers, and real experiences are what make a brand's claims credible, not tone or aesthetic. In other words, generic brand voice has less room to do the work it used to.
📕The Short Story
Can Reddit Fend Off A New Wave Of AI SEO Spam? (15-min read)
The Title Cards In Blade Runner Are F**king Amazing (6-min read)
The Lost Civic Life Of Movie Rental Stores (11-min read)
Taste Is All That’s Left (16-min read)
Reading Maps: Journeys From Fiction Drawn On The Real World (interactive map)
📣 Virginie Faucon Crushes On ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ By Hayao Miyazaki (18-min listen) 📣
Sturgeon said it decades ago, defending science fiction from a critic: ninety percent of everything is crap. He meant it as consolation. Ninety percent of every field is bad, so do not judge the field by its bulk. But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build. The ninety percent was throttled at the source by the sheer inconvenience of making it.
📚 The Long Story
Get Your Top 8 Friends Ready: MySpace Is Making A Comeback (4-min read)
In a world where social media platforms are rightfully being lambasted for all but making the ‘social’ out of the term disappear in favour of what the algorithm prioritises, MySpace (hello 2000’s!) is going to make a comeback. In a different form to combat today’s tech titans no doubt, but still exciting news.
Artist Uniform: How Vivienne Westwood’s Orb Outlived Punk (4-min read)
A nice look at the history of an iconic logo and piece of jewellery: Vivienne Westwood’s Orb. Originally inspired by the Crown Jewels and British royalty, over the years it became a symbol of anti-establishment: “Here was a former schoolteacher turned Godmother of Punk, mixing British iconography, an anti-establishment ethos, and 18th-century romanticism into something seamless (and sellable).”
Entertainment Report Richard Rushfield On The Future of Showbiz (2-min watch)
In the Substack Post, a documentary-style video interview with entertainment reporter Richard Rushfield, who speaks about the difference between showbiz journalists in the old times and now, a nostalgic look at Los Angeles theatres, and how power has been replaced with interestingness in the modern era. We are making a short documentary-style video at the moment for a client, so this one caught my attention.
Can Reddit Fend Off A New Wave Of AI SEO Spam? (15-min read)
Reddit’s value in the age of AI-powered search is significant (see the importance of reviewers and communities in the Edelman report cited above). Subreddit moderators are trying to crack down: “The main advantage that we have as people who are trying to stop [brands] from advertising is that they’ve got an agenda that a normal poster doesn’t have, and that is usually fundamentally what shines through and that’s how we spot them,” said one moderator. You can’t fake authenticity. Take that, AI.
The Old World Is Dying: Opinionated Advice For 2026 Grads (13-min read)
This is a topic I have had conversations about with too many people to name recently, and a lot of them are young people. Whether you’re a giver or receiver of similar advice, this is very relevant to 2026 careers.
The Title Cards In Blade Runner Are F**king Amazing (6-min read)
This one is for those who appreciate design and craft. Typography isn’t just about fonts, it’s also about feeling. Using the initial font plan for Blade Runner’s title sequence as the case study (Impact) and comparing it to the final version (Goudy Oldstyle), we get to understand why it is important to obsess over the detail. This is a Storythings philosophy too and we always bring it up as we conceptualise the things we work on because, as the piece says, “A good product sounds like the humans who created it, and that’s what you will feel.”
The Lost Civic Life Of Movie Rental Stores (11-min read)
An adapted excerpt from the book “From Betamax to Blockbuster” by Joshua P. Greenberg, Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which looks at how video rental stores were in reality a community hub or third place similar to British pubs, French cafés or German beer gardens are now. It’s so interesting to read about the video store clerk-customer relationship in the words of these clerks! This is an approach we use a lot in our stories: characters shouldn’t just have action happening to them; let them tell the story in their own words.
Taste Is All That’s Left (16-min read)
In as much as AI is eating the world etc., the one thing we can agree on, as programmer raf says in this post, is that you can’t fake taste, and you can only really get that by doing trying, failing, and doing again. It’s interesting to note that apparently some of the comments on this piece say it was written by an LLM, to which the author declares that whatever anyone may think, it really was not. Some good writing that’s worth a read.
Reading Maps: Journeys From Fiction Drawn On The Real World (interactive map)
Matt shared this and if you love reading, you’ll definitely like this project that ‘maps’ the journey of characters or narratives in popular books, from Moby Dick and Treasure Island to Shantaram and Midnight’s Children. I lost some time exploring this. You can also submit books to be considered if they aren’t there already!
📣 Virginie Faucon Crushes On ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ By Hayao Miyazaki (18-min listen) 📣
In our podcast Creative Crush, this week we have Global Chief Marketing and Customer Officer of AXA Health International, Virginie Faucon, talking about the project that lights her up creatively: Miyazaki’s movie and the theatre production of ‘My Neighbour Totoro’. I’ve watched both versions, and love what she had to say. Have a listen - and if you’re in London and haven’t watched the show yet, I highly recommend it too! It’s on till January 2027.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Dr. Julia Stamm talks about the difference in the approach to AI by Elon Musk and Arthur Mensch, co-founder of AI company Mistral, based on a piece in The Economist. She argues that we need more people with the perspective of Mensch. Read on to find out what that is.
READ DR. STAMM’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
