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 are about to launch our new format for B2B CMOs at Storythings, and we’re interested in potential contributors. So if you are a CMO (or CMO-adjacent) in a large B2B business, we’d love to have you on the format! Hit reply, and we can have a chat.
As we’ve been developing the format, we knew we needed something that could build up over time to create a really interesting archive. This is important for two reasons - new audiences will come to your format years after you started it, and we know from our research that many of them will dive into the archives and spend a LOT of time and attention exploring all your great stories. Secondly, when you make a lot of versions of a format (rather than just one campaign) you get more and more efficient at it.
But there is a third reason - a lot of research shows that if you have a deep bank of archive content, you are more likely to show up in an AI search. And interestingly, it doesn’t matter if your archive has had break out ‘viral’ success - the AI agents are looking for lots of content, not a few hits.
This great article from Digiday shares research showing that Youtube archives are becoming really important for brand GEO strategies, even showing up more often that word-heavy archives like Reddit.
The really interesting insight is that the older strategy of trying to ‘win’ at social and get lots of views isn’t helping your brand in an age of AI search:
Jack Smyth, country lead for Brandtch in Australia, told Digiday that his company’s research found LLMs favoring videos with fewer than 100,000 views, that landed in the 10-20 minute range, and which had titles with 8-12 words.
“We’ve watched YouTube progressively rise to become the most important platform for [a] brand’s share of model,” he said in an email. Videos containing “information density”, and answers to popular questions were cited more often than general content, he added.
We’ve been saying for quite a long time at Storythings that B2B marketing is about building great formats, then committing to them and growing an archive of great content. Here’s a link to an article we wrote on the value of building your own archive back in 2023. I’m not saying we were ahead of the game, but I’m not not saying that either…
So - if you’ve been spreading your content thinly across every social platform, you might want to start thinking about building your own archive. The companies that are creating the most value in our new AI world are the ones that have just carried on building archives of great, human content over the years - like Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube - whilst others have pivoted to chase every fashionable whim.
We’ve built quite a lot of archives for our clients, and even after we’ve finished the format, the content still generates lots of attention, from humans and AI agents. Here’s a few of our favourites:
The Storythings Newsletter
This is our OG format, started by Hugh over 13 years ago.
Formats Unpacked Newsletter
This was our second regular newsletter, and is another genius format from Hugh. There’s over 120 formats unpacked in the archive, so go ahead and dive in!
ADP Payroll Around The World Podcast
One of the many formats we make for ADP, the goal from the beginning was to build an archive showcasing ADP’s experts on the ground. We love producing this, and the stories are always fascinating!
How We Get To Next
This is a great example of a secondary format ending up more successful than the format it was commissioned to support. Originally started to accompany Steven Johnson’s book and PBS/BBC TV series How We Got To Now, our online publication ended up running for a further five years, building up an archive of hundreds of articles, infographics and podcasts about the diverse future of innovation.
Nevertheless Podcast
Finally, this two season podcast for Pearson had a huge impact, and still continues to get attention every year for Women In STEM week, thanks to the series of posters we commissioned celebrating diverse female pioneers. I’ve seen our posters from that archive used everywhere from my daughters’ school in Hove to the atrium of a Science Museum in Miami.
That last point reminds me of the truly powerful thing about archives - they end up creating extra value in unpredictable ways, just by sitting there, ready to be discovered and reused, whether by an AI or a human (or ideally, both).
Warren Buffet often said that his success was built on the magic of compounding - making good investments, and then leaving them there to do their magic. In a similar way, archives act like compound interest - the longer they stick around, the more valuable they become. I’ll leave the last word to him:
"My life has been a product of compound interest. Nothing more. Nothing less. And nothing brilliant"
So, what brands have created great archives? Hit reply and let me know!
See you next time,
Matt
