B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 Happy Friday!
Storythings’ very own wav wizard Chris Mitchell is hosting a live premier of his new podcast Redemption Man at Sheffield Doc Fest on June 11th. He won the Whicker Award at DocFest last year for his pilot, and used the funding to go deeper into the story of the mysterious man carrying a white cross around NW London. If you’re at DocFest this year, you won’t want to miss this - it’s an amazing story, and a brilliant bit of storytelling.
💻 DATA POINT As AI content fills our feeds, how can we tell what is real from what is fake? Matt Klein’s Zine commissioned YouGov to survey Americans on how often they think they see AI content, and how confident they are at telling the difference between AI and reality: “When it comes to those who report multiple encounters a day – the age gap is stark: 10% of Gen Z vs. 29% of Boomers. A 3x difference.”
Matt Klein’s report on whether we can tell AI from reality
📕 The Short Story
Taken: What Your Browser Knows About You (5-min interactive)
Interactive Explanation of How AI Actually Works (series of short lessons)
How to Prove You’re a Time Traveller (45-min video)
Why Govs need to worry about AI ‘Service Flooding’? (5 min read with lots of charts)
The Ace Hotel Now Has a Substack (Substack Publication)
Why Every Company Needs to Become A Publisher (7-min read)
TrAPPed - Pulitzer Prize Winning News Comic (10-min read)
Survey on Whether People Can Detect AI Content (10-min read/longer report)
📣 Airborne: We’re Five Mutations From A Major Pandemic (4-min read) 📣
The way people discover companies has fundamentally changed. AI is now the front door for a majority of B2B buyers. The brands that show up inside those AI answers are the ones that publish original, expert-driven, structured content at a pace and quality that AI systems treat as authoritative. The brands that do not publish get described by whatever scraps the model can find, or they get left out entirely.
Every company needs to become a publisher. Not eventually. Now.
📚 The Long Story
Taken: What Your Browser Knows About You (5-min interactive)
This is quite chilling - a short description of what your browser knows about you based on tracking data. The specifics will depend on how locked down you are - I use Safari, which is more private than Chrome, but still was quite shocked by what it could tell.
Interactive Explanation of How AI Actually Works (series of short lessons)
I absolutely love this short series of interactive lessons created by Rob Ennals for his 11 year old son. The text is simple and clear, and the little interactive elements really help you understand how LLMs and AI’s actually work.
How to Prove You’re a Time Traveller (45-min video)
I’m a big fan of the Goalhanger podcast network, but hadn’t yet started with The Rest Is Science, despite being a MASSIVE NERD. This episode converted me- it’s exactly the kind of interesting rabbit hole that I love, and bends your brain in all sorts of delightful ways.
Why Govs need to worry about AI ‘Service Flooding’? (5 min read with lots of charts)
I’ve been hearing from friends working in government about how they were seeing more and more AI driven requests, and this great report from Chris Schmitz shows just how serious this is getting. Digital transformation has opened up and made accessible a lot of essential government services. Will AI ‘service flooding’ force them to close up again?
The Ace Hotel Now Has a Substack (Substack Publication)
We’ve been tracking the number of B2C and B2B brands that have started publications on Substack and other newsletter sites, as we’ve long been recommending to our clients that they need to create formats that are valuable enough to subscribe to. The Ace Hotel, though far from it’s early 00s hipster peak, has jumped on the bandwagon.
Why Every Company Needs to Become A Publisher (7-min read)
This great ‘AI Search Manifesto’ from The State of Brand caused a lot of head-nodding-in-agreement amongst the Storythings team. The best time to create your brand’s content archive was 20 years ago. The second best time is NOW!
TrAPPed - Pulitzer Prize Winning News Comic (10-min read)
I loved looking through this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners, and this comic from Bloomberg really caught my eye. It shows how a simple, but innovative, visual format can make a complex story immediate, human, and impactful.
Survey on Whether People Can Detect AI Content (10-min read/longer report)
Friend of Storythings Matt Klein commissioned YouGov to find out how AI is affecting our ability to detect AI versus reality. The results are eye-opening, but this quote in particular is very concerning: “More than half (61%) of Americans report they come across content they can’t tell is AI or not multiple times a week. Nearly 33% of Americans are unsure about content on a daily basis. Uncertainty is now routine.”
Daniel Pink on How To Spend Money To Increase Your Happiness (8-min watch)
As a palate cleanser after than last report, I loved Daniel Pink’s short video with 5 insights about spending money and happiness. This could be cheesy, but the insights are specific, and science backed, enough, that they genuinely made me reflect on what I spend my money on. And it made me want to book lots of cool experiences with my family over summer.
📣 Airborne: We’re Five Mutations From A Major Pandemic (4-min read) 📣.
Seeing the Bloomberg comic above reminded me that we commissioned this short comic for our Fowl Plague series for Gates Foundation back in 2017. It was prescient for the COVID pandemic just a few years later, and it makes, erm, interesting reading right now…
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
I’ve linked to Iain Tait’s AI experiments in the newsletter before. I love how he’s using AI in a way that is actually making things MORE human, not less. In this short video, he demonstrates a tool that turns speech into text and then lets him manipulate it in real time with his hands. As he says, it might be ‘boll**ks’, but I think it’s fun, playful and human. More AI experiments like this please!
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
