Hi there everyone,

Some good news from Team Storythings: we’re thrilled to announce that we’re a finalist in the inaugural Indie Agency News Top 40 and shortlisted for Brand Storytelling 2025 in the Podcast category, both for our podcast Phoenixed for the Global Payroll Association. It feels very validating to have some of our work recognised in this way - so thank you to our brilliant client Mel Pizzey, CEO of the Global Payroll Association, for being such a great commissioner and giving us the opportunity to tell the story of Canada’s $3 billion payroll implementation disaster, and to our fantastic team of talent led by Grace Dobush.

If you’d like us to help find your big story or stories, we can work with you on a 15-day story finding sprint, so press the button below and let’s see what magic we can create together!

OK, time to scroll through our weekly dose of inspiration. Lots for you to get through, so grab your cuppa of choice and read on!

Wishing you sunny weekends,

Anjali

Uncanny Halloween: Real-Life Stories of Paranormal Encounters (1-minute episodes)

After Software Eats The World, What Comes Out The Other End? (9-minute read)

The Unraveling Of Space-Time (multi-feature website)

Formats Unpacked: Tetris (6-minute read)

‘Don’t Just Release The Data, Put A Data Journalist On The Story’ (1-minute read)

Sonos Opens A Trello Board So We Can See How It’s Fixing The Busted App (2-minute read)

As Hollywood Comes For Brands, New Models Emerge (2-minute read)

Why Marketers Are All About Non-Traditional Formats Now (5-minute read)

Alfonso Cuarón Subverted Sci-Fi And Fantasy. Now He’s Coming For TV (14-minute read)

Tumblr & Archrival’s The State Of Community (multi-layered website & report)

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. Here are 2 reasons to get in touch. 

1. “I want to tell better stories” – You’ve been creating content but it’s not having the impact you need. Talk to us about our Content Audit Workshop.

2. “I need help making things” – You know what you want to make, but need an agency to make it. We can help make your podcast, video, publication, animation or newsletter. We do other things too. Get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

Uncanny Halloween: Real-Life Stories of Paranormal Encounters (1-minute episodes)
It’s October - well almost mid-October - and that means it’s only a couple of weeks till Halloween! If you’re into ghosts, monsters and the spookiness of the season, you might enjoy these 1-minute daily podcast episodes hosted by Danny Robbins, throughout this month. It’s an extension of the Uncanny franchise, where the previous season was set in the USA. We love short formats at Storythings - in fact so much so that we created our own 9-minute daily podcast when we were at the Cannes Lions earlier this year. Oh, and also I’ve got my copy of Colin’s Castle for my kids this Halloween, have you?

After Software Eats The World, What Comes Out The Other End? (9-minute read)
Johns Hopkins Professor Henry Farrell on Large Language Models (LLMs) broadly, and NotebookLM in particular. With references to Philip K. Dick and Being John Malkovich, his point, after getting a podcast made of some of his own work, is one that a number of people have been echoing in the weeks since NotebookLM launched: “The problem with the self-devouring curse of recursion is that it is a result about models, their inputs and their outputs. Human beings only feature at the very beginning of the story, when they generate the outputs that are initially fed to the model. But in actuality, LLMs, like other algorithms, repeatedly influence and are influenced by human culture.”

The Unraveling Of Space-Time (multi-feature website)
One of our favourite publications, Quanta Magazine, has a beautiful series of essays, some combined with amazing data visualizations, of something many theoretical physicists have been discussing lately: Albert Einstein’s space-time theory needs to be investigated a bit more.

Formats Unpacked: Tetris (6-minute read)
This week in our Formats Unpacked newsletter, Samira Sohail from Luxo Beta unpacks one of my favourite childhood games and tells us what exactly it is that keeps people going back and staying engaged.

‘Don’t Just Release The Data, Put A Data Journalist On The Story’ (1-minute read) 
Matt and I spoke to Noah Greenberg from Stacker the other week, and it’s fascinating to see how they’re innovating within media. Most recently, they took a story about student loan debt in the US originally published by Experian’s research team (who obviously have a lot of data), then used that to create unique versions of the data for all 50 states, resulting in 260+ publications picking up the story.

Sonos Opens A Trello Board So We Can See How It’s Fixing The Busted App (2-minute read)
It’s not the only tech company doing this, but possibly an early-ish example of a non-games company doing this: Sonos has created a public Trello board to gain customers’ confidence back and reassure them that the bugs in their app are being dealt with.

As Hollywood Comes For Brands, New Models Emerge (2-minute read)
Media homies will be familiar with the Upfronts model of pitching shows to advertisers. With streaming companies not being as forthcoming with their budgets for shows and films as before, there’s an opportunity for brands to take their place, and multiple IP and distribution options in play. Production company Sugar23 launched ‘The Way Upfronts’ earlier this year. Founder Michael Sugar said: “It’s closer to the way Hollywood pitches on a daily basis,” he said. “Pitches, sizzle reels, ideas, packaged scripts, whatever. What we’re creating is a marketplace.”

Why Marketers Are All About Non-Traditional Formats Now (5-minute read) 
From PR activations to long-form content or packaging innovations, brands are now making themselves seen in non-traditional places - or at least in places that are just not TV, radio, OOH or online ads. We often talk about Eat Big Fish’s work on the cost of being dull. As the piece says: “That may be a result of marketers championing a blend of performance and brand – rather than performance over brand – a shift that C-Suites are starting to embrace. There’s a slow recognition that marketers must invest in brand marketing to (hopefully) pay dividends in the long-term.”

Alfonso Cuarón Subverted Sci-Fi And Fantasy. Now He’s Coming For TV (14-minute read)
At first I started reading this piece because I know the journalist, who is a friend of mine. But there is so much to like in this interview he did with director Alfonso Cuarón in Wired that I thought it would be silly not to share it with you all! From sci-fi to the art of cinema and the influence of the algorithm in today’s media consumption online, it’s all there: “In film, you take images and put them in relationship with other images to convey a meaning. There’s a visual layer, a visual way in which stories are told. In order to do that, you have to surrender to it. Many series cannot be concerned about that. They need to keep moving the narrative forward constantly. The narrative is leading the show—that’s their amazing strength.”

Tumblr & Archrival’s The State Of Community (multi-layered website & report)
Tis’ the season for the end-of-year reports to start making an appearance. This one, by Tumblr and youth culture agency Archrival, mentions the importance of helping younger consumers feel a sense of belonging online. Growing a community or increasing responses from an audience are both key to the success of your content as a marketer, and you can see why everyone including Gen Z is getting drained by social media: “Put simply, social media has lost the social and become all media — endless, overwhelming media."

That’s it for this week! We hope you enjoyed our curation of stories. Ask everyone you know to subscribe - we’d really appreciate it!

Thanks for reading. Till next week!

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the rest of Team Storythings