Is Storytelling the New Marketing?

Did you see the The Wall Street Journal piece and how they're looking to hire more storytellers? I I did not. So this is again from Akash, Gupta. So the storyteller job title doubled on LinkedIn in one year, and then Wall Street Journal just did a piece on how their people are trying to hire more storytellers. So Vanta is paying $274,000 for a head of storytelling. Okay? Executives mentioned storytelling on earning calls 456 times in 2025, up from 359 in the last year. Everyone thinks this is a marketing trend. The actual story spans hundreds of years of professional storytelling, and the current spike is a reversion, not an innovation. The job, title dates to medieval Europe. And so I think what's worth calling out here is in a world where where things are gonna be a lot more AI heavy, you want a way to stand out. That's what marketing is at the end of the day. How do you go about standing out? So, look, IBM had a chief storyteller in 2010. SAP had one in 2013. Microsoft brought on Steve Clayton. I don't know who that is. So all that to stay, Neil, I think, you know, you and I, I would say, let me just speak for myself. I wouldn't say I'm the best storyteller in the world. But, you know, we're constantly out there constantly trying new things and that's our way of storytelling because we share examples of how things are going. I I think I'm actually a pretty good storyteller. Do you? Okay. I don't think I'm a good storyteller. You you you could you should share share some of these dynamics around storytelling then. Yeah. So with storytelling, I used to do a lot of storytelling when I used to write a ton of blog content, and with storytelling, you wanna take people through an emotional rollercoaster, what I found to be super effective. It's not just the hooks, it's about the ups, the downs, being super descriptive so they feel that they're there. You know, you have the happy moments, the sad moments, the scary moments, you know, the exciting moments. And what you're really doing with storytelling, I hate to say this, is you're creating content with more fluff. Seriously, like, if you just think about content that has tons of storytelling, it's just a lot of fluff. And it goes against what a lot of the LLMs like when it comes to content. They like content that's short, to the point, that just has the data, the facts, whatever point, you know, someone is interested in. It just highlights it. Structured data just makes it as quick as possible. But I found if you wanna captivate readers, you need to do storytelling. And a great example of this is mister Beast. My son who's four loves watching mister Beast's videos on YouTube. He doesn't know who mister Beast is, but he now kinda knows mister Beast's …