The New Storytellers

Why the “storyteller shortage” isn’t new.

There’s been a noticeable surge in job postings lately for “storytellers.”

Not copywriters. Not content managers. Storytellers!

The trend has surfaced across platforms like LinkedIn and was recently highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article tied to the rise of AI and content automation. The timing isn’t accidental. As generative AI and large language models reshape how content is created, summarized, and distributed, companies are suddenly worried about narrative again. They’re hiring for roles meant to bring cohesion, voice, and meaning to an ecosystem that’s become fragmented and increasingly automated.

At first glance, it looks like a new role emerging for a new era. It isn’t.

For anyone who’s spent time inside marketing and advertising over the two decades, this conversation will feel oddly familiar. What we’re seeing isn’t the birth of a new profession. It’s the rediscovery of an old one, and an overdue reckoning with what marketing leadership quietly deprioritized over the last decade.

This Isn’t a New Role. It’s a Forgotten One.

Strip away the modern title and most of these “storyteller” roles look familiar. They resemble copywriters, brand writers, editorial leads, or narrative strategists. These are positions that once sat at the center of agencies and in-house marketing teams. For decades, these roles shaped how brands spoke, what they stood for, and how meaning was built over time.

Then something changed.

As digital channels multiplied and performance marketing took hold, storytelling was slowly pushed aside. Speed became the advantage. Optimization became the language, and output became the goal. Narrative work … the slower, less immediately measurable discipline of shaping belief was seen as inefficient, indulgent, or nice-to-have.

We didn’t lose storytellers. We chose something else instead. And that choice wasn’t driven by technology alone. It was driven by what organizations decided to reward.

The Real Shift Was What We Measured

Digital didn’t kill storytelling. Measurement did.

As dashboards became more sophisticated, marketing leadership followed what was visible. Clicks, impressions, conversions, engagement rates - all useful signals, but none of them a proxy for meaning. Over time, what could be tracked most easily became what mattered most.

Content volume replaced narrative coherence. Activity replaced intent, and short-term performance replaced long-term belief.

Storytelling didn’t fail in this environment. It was simply out-incentivized.

And because the decline happened gradually, many organizations didn’t notice what they were losing. The brand still “worked.” The content still shipped, and marketing cheered about the volume. The numbers still moved - until suddenly they didn’t. And now, we’re seeing brands that feel interchangeable, hollow, or loud without being distinct.

AI Didn’t Create the Problem. It Just Exposed It.

The arrival of generative AI didn’t invent the demand for storytellers. It revealed the absence of story leadership.

We know that AI can generate language at scale. It can remix tone, summarize positioning, and produce content faster than any team ever could. What it can’t do is decide what a company stands for, what matters most, or which truths are worth repeating consistently over time.

When organizations rushed to deploy AI across their content engines, the cracks became visible almost immediately. Without a clear narrative foundation, AI simply amplified inconsistency. It didn’t dilute the story, it just exposed that there wasn’t one to begin with. And this is why companies are suddenly “desperately seeking storytellers.” Not because storytelling is new, but because automation made the lack of clarity impossible to ignore.

AI didn’t create a storyteller shortage. It revealed how little narrative ownership most organizations still have.

The Mistake Companies Are Making Right Now

Faced with this gap, many organizations are responding the same way they always do: by hiring a role and hoping it fixes the problem. But let’s be clear. It won’t.

A single storyteller cannot compensate for unclear strategy, misaligned leadership, or a culture that treats narrative as output rather than infrastructure. Without clarity from the top, even the strongest storyteller becomes a content executor, simply translating ambiguity into words, rather than shaping meaning. And this is the fundamental misunderstanding playing out right now. Storytelling is being treated as a production function when it was never meant to be one.

You cannot delegate clarity.

Storytelling Was Always a Leadership Skill

Long before it was a marketing discipline, storytelling was a leadership capability.

The strongest leaders, both inside and outside of business, have always been able to articulate purpose, translate complexity, and create shared belief. They didn’t rely on frameworks to explain what mattered. They could say it plainly. Repeatedly. Consistently. In a way others could carry forward - whether they were leading companies, movements, or institutions far larger than themselves.

Marketing leadership has always been expected to do the same. But somewhere along the way, that expectation eroded. Strategy decks replaced narrative conviction. Messaging frameworks replaced point of view. Leaders became comfortable managing channels without being able to clearly explain what the brand actually stood for.

Hiring a storyteller doesn’t fix that gap. Leadership owning the story does. If a marketing leader cannot clearly articulate the company’s narrative, no role on the org chart will compensate for it.

From Story Production to Narrative Ownership

The work organizations actually need to do right now is quieter and harder than posting a job description. Leaders must define the narrative before content exists. They must establish what the brand believes, what it refuses to be, and what trade-offs it is willing to make. Marketing’s role then becomes one of stewardship. It sets the guardrails, reinforces clarity, and ensures the signal stays strong as execution scales.

This isn’t about scripting every word. It’s about making it easy for others to tell the story accurately because they understand it deeply. When that clarity exists, true content will accelerate instead of fragmenting. AI becomes an amplifier rather than a liability, and teams stop chasing engagement volume, and start building meaning. It’s an old saying, but “sometimes less is more.”

When Strategy Is Clear, Everyone Becomes a Storyteller

Once that “story” is in place, the strongest brands don’t rely on a single storyteller. They create environments where storytelling happens naturally. Employees tell consistent stories because they live them. Customers retell them because they recognize themselves in them (here are your brand ambassadors). And the key here; algorithms summarize them coherently because the signals are aligned.

Storytelling scales only after clarity exists, and that’s the inversion many organizations are missing today. They try to scale storytelling before they’ve done the leadership work required to support it.

What This Moment Is Really Asking of Leaders

The current obsession with storytellers isn’t a talent trend. It’s a reminder that clarity can’t be automated, outsourced, or retrofitted after the fact. It must be owned. Named. Repeated. Protected.

Let me repeat that - Owned. Named. Repeated. Protected.

Hiring storytellers won’t save unclear brands. But clear leadership makes every voice, human or machine, tell the same story.

Perspective by Clint Allen | President & Founder, CLINTONSCOTT

Feel free to share this with your social networks!