B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 👋🏼 Happy Friday!
I spent yesterday at the very plush new Premier League Studios in Olympia, West London, talking at the Leaders’ Attention Seekers workshop. The group included CMOs and leaders from a lot of leading sports bodies, organisations, and content platforms, including, to my great joy, my club Spurs.
I shared some early data from our current survey on Creative Friction, and some of the work I’ve been sharing on our Attention Matters newsletter about Good, Bad and Hidden Friction. The session seemed to go down well, so if you’d like us to come and run a workshop or session on creative friction in your organisation, hit reply and we can talk!
💻 DATA POINT: This week’s data point is not a big survey or a report, but just a single data point. Sometimes one obscure fact can tell a bigger story about what’s going on in our society, and this a great example. PPG, a coating materials company in the US, expects to triple turnover of grey paint this year. The reason? Data centers. Apparently a single data center will need between $3-8m of paint for a single building. And because most of the space is devoid of humans, it’s all just shades of grey. I love stats that show the irreducible physicality of even the most virtual infrastructure.
Read till the end for a LinkedIn article with lots more data like this
📕The Short Story
Paul Bettany on How Editors Save You (1.5min watch)
The UK Has More Food Banks Than McDonalds (new Matthew Herbert project)
The Man Who Saved The Internet (8-min read)
Cory Doctorow at Back Market’s Slow Tech Summit (32min watch)
30 Years Of Talking To My Computer (12min read)
Character Club (Monthly Art Subscription)
The First Reader Isn’t Human (5min read)
What We Can Learn About Attention From John Berger (12min read)
Too Much Future (5 Essay collection)
📣 Does AI Help or Hinder Creative Friction? (5min read) 📣
I’m in the stage of my life where I was like, This is bad. It needs to be fixed. But it doesn’t cause panic, at least for me. It did cause panic for a lot of people. But you know, it was more like, We have a situation, it needs to be solved, and this is how we do it. And I have time to properly prepare. If I didn’t have time to properly prepare, then it would cause a lot of stress. From where I stand, it was not stressful, because I’m doing this as a volunteer, and if I get hit by a bus, then it will be someone else’s problem.
📚 The Long Story
Paul Bettany on How Editors Save You (1.5min watch)
I loved this interview excerpt from Marvel, partly for Paul Bettany’s very honest take on how hard it is to film a big superhero movie, but also for his very heartfelt appreciation for editors, who take the raw material of complex VFX shoots like this and pull real emotion out of it.
The UK Has More Food Banks Than McDonalds (new Matthew Herbert project)
Matthew Herbert holds a pretty unique position in being a globally respected dance music producer, but also a brilliantly innovative and politically engaged artist. His latest project, which you should definitely sign up to, is based entirely on found sounds from items commonly found at UK foodbanks.
The Man Who Saved The Internet (8-min read)
I swear that when we included a story last week about how the internet’s infrastructure was based on the work of just a few volunteers, we didn’t know PHP was about to break and create one of the biggest internet security issues ever. Casey Newton spoke to Ondřej Surý, who fixed the bug, and I can’t say I’m feeling any better after reading his interview.
Cory Doctorow at Back Market’s Slow Tech Summit (32min watch)
Back Market are building a really smart content strategy around the idea of ‘slow tech’ at the moment, which we’re loving at Storythings. The latest release is a video of Cory Doctorow talking at their recent Slow Tech Summit. I can’t think of many consumer tech brands who would do this, so well done Back Market!
30 Years Of Talking To My Computer (12min read)
Anjali shared this lovely little essay reminiscing on emotional responses to computers that seem to talk to us, from simple text interfaces in the 1980s to chatbots today. I loved this because my first ever interaction with a computer was an Apple IIe in my town library in the mid 80s. It ran a programme that asked for my name. After giving it my real name first time, I realised it used it to address me for the rest of the demo, so typed a rude word the second time. And lo - a career mucking around on computers was born!
Character Club (Monthly Art Subscription)
Excuse me for including a link from someone very close to me, but I think a lot of you will like this. Holly Swain is the author/illustrator of many books, including the recent Colin’s Monster (perfect for Halloween!) She invents far too many characters to fit into her books, so is starting up a monthly service where she will post you two gorgeous A5 prints every month, perfect for framing, sticking on the wall, or giving away to friends. The Posthouse platform used for the subscription service is really interesting too - designed specifically for monthly physical postal subscriptions, it reminds me of the awesome Newspaper Club.
The First Reader Isn’t Human (5min read)
Anjali and I were at The Communications Network Global Commons event in London this year, and they are a fantastic organisation that convenes and supports comms professionals in the non-profit sector. This is a great example of what they do - a practical guide with useful takeaways on how to design your comms plan when your first reader isn’t a real person, but an AI agent.
What We Can Learn About Attention From John Berger (12min read)
I loved this long essay from A O Scott in the New York Times. I’m a big fan of John Berger anyway- I was at Art School in the early 90s, and Ways Of Seeing was our bible. This essay introduces Berger’s work not just on visual culture, but class and society more broadly, reminding us that what we choose to pay attention to is not just a cultural, but a political act.
Too Much Future (5 Essay collection)
Anjali shared this collection of five essays exploring the future in a time when it seems to be bleeding all too quickly into the present. It’s by Tracey Follows, founder of the FutureMade strategic foresight group. A strong recommend to download and read over the weekend.
📣 Does AI Help or Hinder Creative Friction? (5min read) 📣
Last of all - the latest in my Attention Matters series on Creative Friction. I’ve had a great response to the series so far, with people telling me they’re sharing the framework of Good, Bad and Hidden friction with their teams. In this post, I take each of those in turn and ask if AI can help or hinder.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Anjali shared this great post from Katie Buckett, founder of the consultancy OneFifty, sharing some great posts and graphs on how social media has become a lot less, well, social. We’ve been tracking similar data for a while, and in our work we’ve had more success building communities in non-public platforms. Private, niche networks are where all the fun is now!
READ KATIE’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
