A couple of things this week: we released episode 3 of our Creative Crush podcast, this time with Graham Wylie, Senior Director - Marketing & Product Strategy at Sage. Graham crushes on the video game and TV series The Last Of Us, and he speaks very poetically about it. I haven’t yet watched The Last Of Us, but I am very motivated to do so as a result of this episode! We’d love to interview more smart, creative marketing leaders. If you know of anyone who’d be as great as Glyn Britton, Jinal Shah or Graham Wylie, please drop us a line!

We’ve also launched a survey to learn more about B2B creative workflows inside companies, particularly any points of friction. We’re going to share our expertise in solving pain points once we learn more in the survey - and the results will be made public in our Attention Matters newsletter. Please share the survey with as many B2B marketers as possible, we’d really appreciate it.

💻 DATA POINT: The Reuters Institute released their 2026 Digital News Report this week. For the first time, social media and video networks are more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news, with a quarter of respondents globally getting their news from news-focussed creators of some type. This general trend is something we have been thinking about a lot at Storythings.

What It Means For Elon Musk To Be Worth $1 Trillion (interactive data visualization)

BBC Scenarios From 2004 About Kids’ Online Lives in 2014 (4-min read and downloadable posters)

A Creative Correspondence With Creativity Coach Beth Lapides (25-min read, set of email exchanges)

Three Decades Of U.K Crisp Packets (book with lovely packet art)

Free, Open Datasets For The African Diaspora (dataset)

Far Out Company: Unearthing The Work Of Under-Appreciated Artists Of The 1960s And 70s Counterculture (image archive)

Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? (10-min read)

‘Working With Us’ Guides For Cultural Organisations: Could Pragmatic Honesty Make For Better Partnerships? (15-min read)

PQ PDF: Your AI Might Read A Different PDF Than Your Users (online tool)

📣 How To Listen For Community Resilience (8-min read) 📣

What It Means For Elon Musk To Be Worth $1 Trillion (interactive data visualization)
A really interesting data visualisation from the New York Times. They used physical dollar bills to see how far $1 trillion would go - how many neighbourhoods would they cover? A billionaire’s wealth would cover over half of Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and Elon Musk’s current wealth would cover all of Los Angeles County land. Talk about wealth inequality!

BBC Scenarios From 2004 About Kids’ Online Lives in 2014 (4-min read and downloadable posters)
In light of the UK’s ban on social media for under-16s, announced this week and planned to go into effect next year, a look back at this piece that Matt wrote in 2015 about some work he did when he was at the BBC back in 2004. At the time, he commissioned posters reflecting some scenario planning exercises on how internet use might change kids’ lives in the UK in 2014. They remain remarkably relevant in 2026 as much as 2014!

A Creative Correspondence With Creativity Coach Beth Lapides (25-min read, set of email exchanges)
Newsletter reader Josh Spector exchanged a lovely set of emails with creativity coach Beth Lapides recently, talking about, as creatives, what they did that day, what they learned from each other, and their general ways of thinking. We love the email exchange format; in fact it reminded me of the email exchange we published between one of the authors we commissioned to write a piece of fiction for our 10th anniversary a few years ago, and a UN diplomat who understood the themes of her story. In many ways the emails were as interesting to read as the story itself, and Josh’s exchanges with Beth are no different.

Three Decades Of U.K Crisp Packets (book with lovely packet art)
This book is a nostalgic collection of crisp packet covers from the 1970’s to the 2000’s in the UK. The art they constitute on their own got the attention of a lot of the Storythings team this week. Someone liked it so much they might even get it for themselves for their birthday (hi Chris)!

Free, Open Datasets For The African Diaspora (dataset)
Kwanda is a brilliant organisation that enables anyone to fund African charitable causes as ‘villagers’, where you get voting rights on the causes that you care about and that Kwanda will deploy money towards. They’ve created this open source dataset for the African and Caribbean diaspora of multiple bits of information they’re likely to find useful, such as what it costs to send money home, which businesses to back, where they can travel and on what terms. This reminded me of a story on global remittances we published for our client ADP a few years ago.

Far Out Company: Unearthing The Work Of Under-Appreciated Artists Of The 1960s And 70s Counterculture (image archive)
Matt shared this on the company Slack and I immediately lost myself in this collection of images and their short narratives for a while. It’s a great example of an archive, built by Sean Flannagan, who started this project on Instagram as a fun way to share the books and posters from the 60’s and 70’s that he was collecting in his apartment.

Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? (10-min read)
Introspective and practical thinking by Tim Ferriss, author of FIVE #1 NYT bestsellers, shared by Hugh this week. Ferriss has been tracking his sales data across the years, and can see the impact of AI on his book sales and podcasts. He goes back to something we truly believe at Storythings: find your 1000 true fans and overdeliver again and again.

‘Working With Us’ Guides For Cultural Organisations: Could Pragmatic Honesty Make For Better Partnerships? (15-min read)
Friend of Storythings Ash Mann has written this excellent piece on how clients and suppliers can work together so much more fruitfully if cultural organisations had a ‘working with us’ guide that honestly laid out ‘a map of how decisions happen in your organisation, who holds power (formal and informal), what slows you down, and how to raise it when something's going wrong’. His advice is honestly applicable to any kind of organisation. More than anything else, this sort of guide would foster psychological safety in a partnership, as Amy Edmondson referenced: "The act of naming the challenge and the risk that organisations face puts everyone on the same page. It is a form of shared acknowledgement. Teams do not have to feel positive about the entire world or external conditions, but they can feel positive about each other if they start laying things out and begin to address challenges honestly with one another about what they are up against."

PQ PDF: Your AI Might Read A Different PDF Than Your Users (online tool)
Matt shared this tool that tests PDFs for document integrity. This is all the more important in a world where AI is scanning data to parse it. As the site says: “The page a person reads and the text a machine extracts are not guaranteed to match — and your AI ingests the machine's version. When they differ, the model learns, retrieves and answers from a version of the document no human ever saw.”

📣 How To Listen For Community Resilience (8-min read) 📣
In Futures In Draft, Jo McAndrews writes about skilful listening in the context of community organising. In a time where communities are pitted against each other by multiple parties, this skill is more important than ever.

It’s been a while since I last saw Tracey Follows, but her thinking is worth following. In this post, she explains the context and logic of the Database Brand: how AI is changing what a brand is: ‘the brand is no longer what it says it is. It is what the system can assemble from what it finds’.

READ TRACEY’S VIEW IN THIS SHORT DOCUMENT >

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