B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
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Happy Friday!
The weather in the UK and EU this week has been insanely hot, and all our brains are frazzled. So I’ve kept this week’s links mostly light-hearted and fun (thanks to the Storythings team doing an awesome job dropping things into our Slack channel). I hope you’re managing to keep cool, wherever you are!
💻 DATA POINT: The weather might have frazzled our brains, but not nearly as much as the team at Softbank, who launched this bizarre investor deck at their AGM this week. Apparently, the difference between their 3T Yen valuation in 2014 and their current 74T Yen valuation was that, wait for it, THE GOOSE WAS NOT VALUED. Honestly, it’s worth looking at the whole deck in order, so you can embrace the insanity of the goose section from slide 45 onwards. We’re all about the power of metaphor at Storythings, obvs, but sometimes someone needs to step back and say “are we making this a little too much about the goose, guys?”
Eggs do not lay eggs. How many times do I need to keep saying this?
📕 The Short Story
The Practical Magic of Carl Sagan’s 1970s Virtual Set (5-min watch)
Faroe Islands Space Program (scrollytelling story)
Silly Software Club (Multiple silly projects)
16 Scenes Of You & Your Dad In Cars (5-min read
The Criterion Complete Kubrick Collection (30 x 4K UHD set)
Silicon Valley Should Learn To Listen (5-min read)
Splash Canvas (fun AI drawing game)
The Making of Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt (5 ep podcast)
The Gift of Room Tone (3-min watch)
📣 Futures In Draft June Roundup (5-min read) 📣
“…much of the AI movement rests on the assumption that the world will reorganize itself around AI’s strengths and preferred ways of working. Maybe that will happen in the future, but not today. Businesses, governments, schools, and communities are shaped by culture, history, incentives, and countless human complexities that don’t yield to a prompt box.
Asking Silicon Valley to be more humble is a ridiculous endeavor. Humility is not the path to changing the world in disruptive ways. So let’s not bother. The world, in all its infinite, messy complexity, will do the job for us.
📚 The Long Story
The Practical Magic of Carl Sagan’s 1970s Virtual Set (5-min watch)
Back in the 1970s, Carl Sagan’s epic TV series Cosmos had some incredible scenes, including walking through the Library of Alexandria. They were not green screen, but shot with a simple yet astonishing bit of practical FX magic.
Faroe Islands Space Program (scrollytelling story)
Anjali shared this excellent bit of storytelling about how the Faroe Islands are using ‘moon power’ to create net-zero energy. It rightly won awards in Cannes this week.
Silly Software Club (Multiple silly projects)
Anjali also shared this lovely compilation of ‘silly software projects’ collected from around the web. This is what the internet should be about!
16 Scenes Of You & Your Dad In Cars (5-min read)
This was posted by friend of Storythings Kevin Maguire, who has just published his excellent book The New Fatherhood. This post is a beautiful, reverse-chronology panel comic by Jordan Bolton, and packs a heavy emotional punch.
The Criterion Complete Kubrick Collection (30 x 4K UHD set)
Break out the piggy bank. You know you want this!
Silicon Valley Should Learn To Listen (5-min read)
Yes, this is another post from the Aboard newsletter. This time, It’s a smart take from Rich Zaid about why Silicon Valley can’t be empathetic, but how the complexity of the world will, eventually, win.
Splash Canvas (fun AI drawing game)
Darren posted this lovely Google AI experiment to the Storythings Slack. The drawing tools are squidgy and fun, but the Ai generated comments from the tools, each with a different personality, turn it into something else altogether. More AI experiments like this please!
The Making of Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt (podcast series)
Storythings’ own award winning audio master Chris Mitchell made a fantastic podcast series about the making of Jay-Z’s debut album. For the 30th anniversary of the album, Chris and his Breaking Atoms partner have reissued the podcast with updated audio (he loves fiddling with the audio…)
The Gift of Room Tone (3-min watch)
Talking of Chris, we had a conversation about ‘room tone’ the other week - the ambient noise you capture when filming or recording podcasts. It’s a lovely little ‘trade secret’, used by audio editors to cover over gaps in edits, as our ears would find truly ‘dead air’ jarring. Every year, the Criterion Collection (see Kubrick box set above) compile all the ‘room tone’ sections of their video interviews into one very sweet video.
📣 Futures In Draft June Roundup (5-min read) 📣
Our project for Joseph Rowntree Foundation is really going from strength to strength, and the monthly newsletter is a must-subscribe if you want to get little moments of joy, resistance and hope into your inbox every month.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Anjali dropped this great article from B2B Marketing guru (and friend of Storythings) Joel Harrison about how the ‘dark conversations’ in agentic search (the ones you don’t see in referrers) have a lot of similarities with the ‘buyer group’ behaviour in B2B sales.
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
