B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 Hello!
🔔 Hello! I was in Prague last week, helping our client ADP with their annual ReThink conference. We’ve been working with them for over five years now, so it’s a great opportunity to meet up with ADP leaders and clients who we’ve worked with over the years. Global Payroll is a very friendly community, which is probably linked to it being very sorely overlooked in most companies. We love helping the ‘hidden heroes’ that really make global business run - if you work in a similar sector and would like help telling your stories, get in touch now!
💻 DATA POINT: I’ve featured this as a link below, but I loved Evan Shapiro’s write up of the brilliant report from Little Dot on how Youtube is changing. The key points - longer videos are now performing way better for revenue, and the most effective video length is about 60mins - the shape of a traditional TV programme.
📕 The Short Story
YouTube shows are getting more like TV (5-min read)
The Origins of Super Mario (10-min read)
Why Women’s Clothes Sizing Is So Complex (great datavis)
The World Of Black Film (new book)
What Does It Mean To Make Something? (8-min read)
Is Your Brand A Good Dinner Party Guest? (10-min read)
A Taxonomy for How AI Really Works (5-min read)
Unread - a Cool AI Fiction Project (AI storytelling project)
The Incredible Story of the Bosnian Skeleton Team (90 sec trailer)
📣 What Could The World Look Like in 2031? (8 stories) 📣
“Making things is a pleasure, it is holy, it is something we do instinctively — like breathing — and it is something we can't stop. The creative impulse is one of the things that makes us human, I think. It's important to say that, even if it does feel, as they say, a little cringe. It is good to make things.
Question: What does it mean to make something? Answer: everything. Keep the faith.”
📚 The Long Story
YouTube shows are getting more like TV (5-min read)
As trailed above, this is a really interesting analysis by Evan Shapiro, who is well worth a follow if you like smart takes on the changing media landscape. I mentioned the insight about YouTube show length, but there’s also really smart analysis of main YT versus YT Shorts - in essence, they are two completely different platforms.
The Origins of Super Mario (10-min read)
Kesa McDonald’s new book about the history of Nintendo looks fantastic, judging by this exceprt telling the origin stories of one of the most famous video game characters of all time. I loved this quote about the culture driving Nintendo’s game developers: “Whenever your curious human mind goes, “I wonder what’s over there?,” the answer should be: Something fun”
Why Women’s Clothes Sizing Is So Complex (great datavis)
We LOVE a good data viz story from the ever excellent Pudding.cool, and this is fantastic - not just great data viz, as usual, but excellent reporting too.
The World Of Black Film (new book)
As the curatorial director at Criterion Films, Ashley Clark has worked hard to raise awareness of the best films by black filmmakers. So this new book is essential for any cinephile out there. Basically, if you’ve got a letterboxd account, you need this book.
What Does It Mean To Make Something? (8-min read)
I love the way Bijan Stephens writes about contemporary culture. He’s very good at combining suprising and refreshing takes with deeply emotional perspectives on what it actually means to be creative. This piece is close to a manifesto for him, and I agreed with all of it.
Is Your Brand A Good Dinner Party Guest? (10-min read)
I’m just realising the links this week are a bit of a fanboy roll-call of some of my favourite writers and sources - Evan Shapiro, Kesa McDonald, It’s Nice That, Bijan Stephens, and now Matt Klein, who Anjali and I had the pleasure of meeting for excellent BBQ at SXSW last year. I love his take here on how we need to move away from performance metrics and take a wider look at how our brands exist in people’s cultural spaces: “Brands are in new environments with old playbooks. Culture’s a dinner party. And orgs' etiquette sucks.”
A Taxonomy for How AI Really Works (5-min read)
This is a really really useful take on how AI actually appears in the world, and how to be more precise when you’re talking about your own strategies and usage of AI
Unread - a Cool AI Fiction Project (AI storytelling project)
Anjali dropped this really interesting experimental narrative project using AI in the Storythings’ Slack. Name a fictional character and it will generate a Gmail inbox so you can nose around in their emails. I tried it with Connell Waldron from, and it was surprisingly sweet!
The Incredible Story of the Bosnian Skeleton Team (90 sec trailer)
I’ve been hooked on the Winter Olympics, especially the curling, skeleton and the big air events. So I’m going to find time to watch this excellent looking feature doc about how the Bosnian Skeleton team trained on disused infrastructure from the Sarajevo Olympics.
📣 What Could The World Look Like in 2031?
Finally - Storythings will be 15 on March 11th! This reminded me that back in 2021, when we were 10, we commissioned a bunch of writers to imagine what life would be like in 2031. Looking forward to coming back in 5 years to see how much they got right!
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
We’re making some new LinkedIn video formats for BCG, and we wanted to show how real human conversations are such an important part of how BCG work. We got really lucky with our first two contributors - Rachel Koh and Ben Keneally. Their conversation was fascinating, and we could have listened to them talk for hours!
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
