For fifteen years, Storythings has built its thinking around a simple but uncomfortable truth: your brand isn’t competing with your industry peers for attention – it’s competing with Netflix, TikTok and WhatsApp. That insight shaped everything we did, and it served us well. But insight alone doesn’t build the kind of client relationships that create lasting impact.

Last year, with fresh eyes on the business, we recognised that the breadth of what we offered – while genuinely valuable – was working against the depth of partnership our clients actually needed. So we moved away from project-based work and toward sustained, embedded partnerships. We also sharpened our focus on B2B, a space where we already had proof: we’ve been working with payroll giant ADP for nearly seven years.

The shift to deeper B2B partnerships gave us the idea for the messaging we’d been looking for.

We’d been watching the content marketing landscape fill up with AI-generated material that all sounded the same: polished, efficient, and utterly devoid of personality. To a real human audience, it reads like communications from the undead. ‘Stay Human’used the language and imagery of zombie culture to make the case that the brands still winning attention are the ones that sound like people, not algorithms.

At the same time, we re-focussed our Attention Matters newsletter with a sharper brief: write about the specific challenges we knew B2B marketing leaders were already wrestling with, or were about to be.

The most immediate challenge was learning to say no – and meaning it. When you’ve operated as a broad-church agency for fifteen years, turning away potential clients because the fit isn’t right feels counterintuitive. But we’d seen enough to know that the wrong client relationships cost far more than they ever generate, in time, energy and focus.

The bigger challenge was internal. The team needed to understand not just what was changing, but why, and what it would mean for the work they were doing day to day. To their credit, the Storythings team came on that journey with genuine enthusiasm, which made the whole process easier.

With a clearer sense of who we’re for and what we’re genuinely best at, every conversation with a potential client starts from a stronger position. We’re not pitching broadly and hoping something lands. Instead, we’re walking into rooms where we already know we can make a meaningful difference, and we can articulate exactly why. The result is an agency that feels genuinely future-facing.

If you’re contemplating a significant change to your agency’s positioning or model, the most useful thing we can tell you is this: do the thinking properly before you do anything else. Map out the repercussions honestly – the clients you might lose, the work you’ll stop doing, the uncomfortable conversations you’ll need to have.

Which brings us to what’s next. The New Business Barometer 2026 makes a compelling case that smaller agencies need to treat their marketing as a sales enablement tool – something that actively opens doors and builds the right relationships over time. As a result, we are soon going to launch My Creative Crush – a Storythings podcast – on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major streaming platforms. Watch this space.