STAY HUMAN - A Reading List

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.

We’re almost at the end of 2024, which has been a tough year for many people in marketing and content agencies. But based on conversations with peers (and our pipeline here at Storythings) 2025 looks like it’s going to be a lot better. We’re optimists at Storythings, and believe we’re at the beginning of a really interesting new era of B2B marketing. We’ll be leaning into this with a new campaign and content series in 2025 to help you STAY HUMAN in a world of AI and performance marketing slop.

We want to interview B2B leaders who are creating incredible human storytelling formats, so if you’d like to be part of our new content series, hit reply and we’ll set up a call for the new year. In the meantime, we wanted to share a format that we use a lot at Storythings - a reading list. For every rabbit hole we go down in our research, we end up with a trail of links of great reading, podcasts and more. So here’s a short selection of great things we’ve found about the new era of more human B2B marketing, either to give you something juicy to read over the xmas break, or to start your brain again when you come back in January. And if you want us to work with you on a campaign in 2025 - we’d love to talk!

Finally - we’re proposing a session for SXSW London on how to move B2B content from Boring to Brilliant, using lessons from the media industry. If you’d like to take part at SXSW London, we’d love your vote!

Articles

Les Binet and Peter Field on 10 years of The Long and the Short of It - A decade on from the launch of The Long and the Short of It, effectiveness experts Les Binet and Peter Field reflect on the book’s impact and look ahead to what’s next.

From Brand To Demand - New-ish Rules For The Next Era of B2B Marketing - we’re big fans of Ronnie Higgins’ insights on the changing world of B2B marketing, and this is a great summary of his thinking, which is very aligned with everything we do at Storythings.

The New Rules of Media - another set of ‘new rules’, this time more broadly about the media industry, from Storythings fave Kyle Chayka. This is brutally honest, but also practical, advice. The media landscape has changed, and the old playbooks - even from the social network peak years of 5-10 years ago - just don’t work any more.

How Youtube Ate Podcasting - A brilliant article from John Herrman on how podcasts have become superformats - a constellation of long and short formats that rely as much on video as audio. And how the heart of podcasts’ cultural impact in 2024 is Youtube - fast becoming the centralised distribution channel for podcasts-as-video.

The Wrong and The Short of it - An illustrated version of Tom Roach’s influential 2020 post criticising the tendency to binary oppositions in marketing theory. Brand and sales activation are both essential, but only when they are considered together.

Books

The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies - This pivotal and much-debated book helped shift the conversation back to the importance of long-term brand building which increasingly deprioritised in favour of short-term performance strategies.

Why Does The Pedlar Sing - Paul Feldwick’s book is described by Rory Sutherland as the book he would most highly recommend to anyone in marketing. Feldwich argues that because of managerial myths of rationality and logic, brands have forgotten how to appeal to the public and that today’s marketing is less liked and less effective than ever before.

A New Creative Era - This is a brilliant zine you can download and print yourself from METALABEL, the new project by Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler. It’s a manifesto for a new approach to creating content, based on networks of talent supporting each other, rather than networks that extract value from creators and keep it to themselves.

Filterworld - This book is probably the one we’ve recommended and quoted from most this year - Kyle Chayka (the author of the ‘new rules of media’ above) absolutely nails the impact of algorithmic platforms on culture and society. Ever wondered why everything looks the same? This book will tell you why.

Podcast Episodes

Uncensored CMO: Sir John Hegarty & Orlando Wood on the next creative revolution - Orlando Wood, author of Lemon and Look Out, and Sir John Hegarty, iconic founder of BBH talk about the scientific evidence for emotional advertising, why they believe a creative revolution is necessary, and what skills the CMO of the future will need.

WARC Marketing Truths - this is a brilliant mini-series of podcasts, each one exploring a common ‘truth’ about marketing. Essential listening, giving you brilliant insight and context on five key truths: 1 - Effectiveness vs Efficiency; 2 - Strong Brands have an effectiveness advantage; 3 - Creativity supercharges effectiveness; 4 - Maximise reach to achieve the greatest impact; and 5 - Building brands is much bigger than advertising.

Research/Reports

The Extraordinary Cost of Dull - Adam Morgan and Peter Field’s superb white paper attempted to put a cost to the price of being dull. They discovered that if you produce a dull campaign in the UK it costs you roughly £10m more in media spend to have the same commercial impact as an interesting campaign.

Pew Research Center and OFCOM Media Nations Reports - Part of making more human B2B marketing is understanding that our attention isn’t different between our work and home lives. Especially in our hybrid work environments, our work media behaviours are part of a broader range of behaviours across everything we give our attention to. So it’s really important to understand broader trends in audience attention when you’re planning B2B content. Your competition for attention isn’t another B2B campaign - it’s Youtube, Instagram and Netflix.

How Often is Creativity Also Effective? - More great content from WARC, this time addressing another common binary opposition in marketing - is creativity or effectiveness more important? Both are lauded in the marketing sector, often with completely different awards, so how much do they actually work together to influence success?

So there you are - our reading list for how to make your B2B marketing more effective, and more human, in 2025. If there’s an article you’ve seen that you think we should add to the list, hit reply and let us know!

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.
Have a great holiday and new year. See you in 2025!

Matt