Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

We’ve been thinking a lot about how we work for our clients at Storythings over the last year, and there has been one particularly important insight that is now shaping our positioning and everything we do.

We always thought our most important skill set was our creative media experience, or our knowledge of audience attention and behaviours when we are thinking about value propositions and creating new formats. When we were mainly doing one-off projects for clients, this early work felt like the biggest and most important thing we did.

But now our work is structured around delivering and improving formats over long periods of time, we’ve realised our most important skillset is how to solve the problem of friction in creative workflows. If you are doing a one off campaign or production project, you can put up with a bit of friction in your workflow. It might cause stress or impact profitability, but that is quickly forgotten when everything is delivered.

When you are delivering the same formats time and time again, that workflow friction gets more and more obvious, and if you don’t solve it, the impact gets bigger and bigger, leading to frustration or burnout for both agencies and clients.

We’ve started researching this more in our workflows, looking at the things we do, sometimes instinctively, to reduce friction in creative workflows, and working with our clients to make this friction more visible so we can all work together to route around it.

As part of this research, we want to ask our network to share their experiences of friction in creative workflows, so we can see if there are patterns (and solutions) that we could share with you all.

We’ve developed a short, multiple choice questionnaire, that should take you about 5-10mins to fill out (If you want to add more detail to your answers that’d be great, but you don’t have to!). Here’s the link - please share it with your networks if you can!

https://forms.gle/ju8b8oxuvTUYegSg9

We’re going to share this across our networks over the next four weeks, and then produce a new report with the results. As a subscriber to Attention Matters, you’ll get access to this report first, and insights from us and our creative talent networks about how to solve them.

Thank you for your help with the research! If you’d like to talk to us about solving your creative workflow friction, hit reply and we’ll set up a call.

As a reward for reading this far, here’s a bit of creative workflow inspiration that I shared in our Friday newsletter recently. Process Pamphlets are beautiful physical and online zines sharing the creative process stories from leading designers and creatives. They’re gorgeous, and really insightful:

Thanks again for your help!

Matt