Why Are Brands Hiring Storytellers?
My morning LinkedIn browsing recently brought some good news.
It came in the form of a post citing a Wall Street Journal article with the ringing title “Companies Are Desperately Seeking Storytellers.”
At first, I thought this must be wishful thinking by an underemployed children’s entertainer. Or perhaps a clever marketing campaign by The Writers’ Union of Canada.
But no.
It’s a 2025 piece by Katie Deighton, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covers marketing, advertising, brand strategy and how companies communicate with consumers.
According to Deighton, the percentage of U.S. LinkedIn job listings containing “storyteller” doubled in a year.
Google has hired Customer Storytelling Managers for Google Cloud.
Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari announced that the company had merged internal communications, external communications, social and influencer into one Storytelling Team.
The trend has continued into 2026.
Amazon has been hiring Multimedia Storytellers, while Nike recently went looking for a multimedia storyteller who understands how brand, media and creators intersect and, wonderfully, “how content travels.”
That last phrase gets pretty close to the heart of it.
Brands are digging storytelling.
But I don’t think this is simply about hiring better writers.
It’s about hiring people who understand how stories evolve across channels, audiences, time and culture.
What is a brand storyteller?
A brand storyteller identifies meaningful stories inside an organization, shapes them into narratives audiences care about, and determines the right medium, platform and moment for telling them.
Writing is part of the job.
Judgment is the bigger part.
Lindsay Bennett, whose LinkedIn post originally caught my attention, describes the job as “finding and influencing the story wherever it happens,” whether that’s earned media, video, creators, newsletters, social or an executive’s own platform.
Ellen B. Silveira, an enterprise narrative and thought-leadership strategist, pushed the idea further:
“Storytelling was always in vogue but now the one-off good story isn’t enough. The way we tell stories has changed. Brands need more substantive, broader corporate narratives that are aligned across many fronts.”
Take a look at your favourite brands.
Many have effectively become publishers.
They have podcasts. YouTube channels. LinkedIn feeds. TikTok accounts. Newsletters. Events. Executive platforms. Creator partnerships. And assorted other mouths demanding to be fed.
Now AI can theoretically generate an almost unlimited quantity of stuff to feed them.
Which means the challenge is shifting.
Brands don’t simply need more content.
Nobody does, really.
What brands need are people who can recognize a good story from a dull one, decide how and where it should be told, and understand how it connects to the audience’s world.
In a blizzard of content, the scarce thing becomes story judgment.
What Does a Brand Storyteller Do That AI Can’t?
AI can assist with research, ideation, writing, editing, transcription, production and distribution.
But before any of that happens, somebody has to notice that a story exists.
Storytellers are trained to look for connections.
Divergent ways of understanding a problem. Unlikely pathways between ideas. New combinations of old ingredients.
Metaphorically, and we all know storytellers love their metaphors, a good corporate storyteller is a kind of magpie.
Always scanning the landscape for the overlooked, the odd, the shiny, the thing everybody else walked past.
Then they carry those fragments home and make something from them.
The raw material may be spectacularly unpromising.
An odd customer question.
A sentence somebody wrote on a whiteboard.
A product failure.
An old photograph.
A peculiar statistic.
The company anecdote everybody has heard so many times they no longer realize it contains a story.
Or the thing an engineer prefaces by saying:
“This probably isn’t very interesting, but…”
Always pay attention when somebody says that, by the way.
For historical fiction author Ken Follett, the spark was five little words.
Where Do Good Brand Story Ideas Come From?
Usually somewhere boring.
Follett’s Circle of Days grew from an encounter with archaeologist Mike Pitts’s nonfiction book How to Build Stonehenge.
Pitts recounts Follett noticing the book’s title in a shop window and essentially thinking: there should be a Ken Follett novel about that.
You can almost see the synapse fire.
Five words that sound like the title of an unusually ambitious Home Depot weekend workshop become the seed of Follett’s latest historical epic.
Follett seems particularly good at imaginative collisions with utilitarian material.
His bestselling The Pillars of the Earth is, among many other things, a very elaborate answer to another basic practical question:
How on earth do you build a medieval cathedral?
Good storytellers notice when two things belong together before anybody else has put them together.
That ability to notice is part of what brands should actually be hiring when they say they want a storyteller.
How Should Brands Choose Between Video, Audio and Other Content Formats?
Finding the story is only the beginning.
Then you have to decide what kind of story it wants to be.
This is where I get wary of the much-used word “repurposing.”
We all know the formula.
Podcast becomes transcript.
Transcript becomes blog.
Blog becomes clips.
Clips become quote cards.
Quote cards roam the earth until somebody finally puts them out of their misery.
Efficient?
Absolutely.
Storytelling?
Sometimes.
Really good cross-platform storytelling asks a different question:
What job should this version of the story do?
When should a brand use video?
Whenever I’m trying to decide whether an idea is asking for a video-first podcast, I start with one question:
What will the audience understand or feel because they can see it?
If the answer is movement, transformation, body language, physical chemistry, demonstration, environment or something inherently visual, the camera has a storytelling job.
If the chief visual attraction is two people sitting behind microphones, I know I’m at risk of recreating Between Two Ferns without Zach Galifianakis.
When should a brand use audio?
Audio asks a different question.
Audio has room for complexity, memory, hesitation and imagination.
It can also create an extraordinary feeling of being there.
The machinery on a factory floor.
Footsteps in a hallway.
Wind through trees.
Someone drawing a breath before answering a difficult question.
Sometimes taking the camera away makes a person more revealing.
Sometimes the picture the listener creates is more vivid precisely because you haven’t supplied one.
I learned this as a kid lying on the living-room carpet listening to Peter and the Wolf.
I can still picture every scene.
And hear it.
How Should a Brand Adapt One Story Across Different Platforms?
A storyteller shouldn’t resize the same object and throw it everywhere.
Different platforms have different storytelling jobs.
TikTok or Reels may want the human moment: the laugh, the reveal, the demonstration, the confession.
LinkedIn may want the idea inside the story: the argument, implication or thing somebody changed their mind about. LinkedIn’s own research on thought leadership points toward provocative insights, subject-matter expertise and interpretation of emerging trends.
A newsletter can step further back.
It can connect ideas, add context, introduce research or resurrect a story because something in the world has suddenly made it relevant again.
A live event might turn the story into a conversation.
A short documentary could show something the original interview could only describe.
Same narrative territory.
Different storytelling job.
So the more useful question for a brand storyteller is:
What part of this story belongs here?
How Can a Branded Podcast Become a Content Platform?
Podcasts are the gift that keeps on giving.
But, as the tagline of CHFR 96.5 FM, my favourite radio station on Hornby Island, puts it:
“Not Everybody Gets It.”
In their case, the weak signal makes that literally true.
In podcasting, too many brands still underestimate how much value can flow from one strong conversation.
At JAR, we tell clients that a good branded podcast doesn’t need to be treated as a finished object.
It can become an evolving source of narrative material.
Spend an hour talking seriously with an interesting person and all sorts of things can tumble out:
An anecdote that deserves its own short video.
An argument worth developing on LinkedIn.
An unanswered question that points toward the next episode.
A person you should follow for a year.
A disagreement nobody knew was there.
A phrase that gives the organization a better way of explaining something it has struggled to articulate.
Sometimes the most valuable thing isn’t the obvious headline at all.
It’s the small aside fourteen minutes in that makes everyone in the control room look up.
That is the work.
Listening.
Watching for opportunities.
Picking up the things that catch the light.
The job is not simply to capture a conversation.
It is to see what’s in it, then determine what deserves depth, what deserves thirty seconds, what needs another voice, what should be left alone and what larger story may be beginning to emerge.
This is why branded podcast companies need to become strategic cross-platform storytellers too.
We need to understand the wider communications landscape well enough to work with internal and external teams and recognize when a podcast story deserves a second, third or fifth life.
The microphone is one tool. The larger opportunity is understanding what the conversation uncovered and where that story should travel next.
What Is Narrative Continuity in Brand Storytelling?
A strong brand story shouldn’t disappear the moment the episode drops.
It might begin in a podcast and surface later as a short video.
Months later something happens in the world and the idea becomes relevant again. Now it wants to be a LinkedIn argument.
That response sparks another interview.
Eventually, the question moves onto a stage at an event.
Or perhaps it happens the other way around.
Either way, the story keeps gathering meaning.
This is more interesting than repurposing.
It is narrative continuity.
Narrative continuity means returning to a recognizable subject, tension or territory over time without simply repeating the same content.
I’ve seen this happen with RBC Disruptors, a show we have worked on for years.
Its territory has always included Canadian innovation, technology, entrepreneurship and big questions about the country’s economic future.
Then came the tariff disputes of 2026.
RBC responded with The Canada Project, bringing the show more directly into questions of Canadian competitiveness, resilience and economic independence.
The conversation changed because the world changed.
But the show hadn’t suddenly put on a fake moustache and become something else.
It was still recognizably Disruptors: Canadian innovators wrestling with large economic questions and trying to figure out what comes next.
That’s the advantage of having strong narrative territory.
You can respond to the zeitgeist without chasing it.
What Is a Brand’s Narrative Territory?
A narrative territory is the collection of subjects, tensions, ideas and questions a brand has credibility and permission to explore repeatedly.
It is broader than a campaign idea.
And it is more durable than a single podcast concept.
Storytellers have been working this way for a few thousand years.
Homer’s Odyssey is roughly 2,700 years old and apparently still has some gas in the tank.
It resurfaces in Joyce’s Ulysses, gets dropped into Depression-era Mississippi by the Coen brothers in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is turned sideways by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad, and arrives again in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Nobody involved needed to invent the concept of a difficult journey home.
What changes is the angle.
- The voice.
- The medium.
- The cultural moment.
That’s worth remembering when brands tie themselves into knots trying to invent a never-before-conceived “content idea.”
Creativity is rarely ex nihilo.
We borrow, collide, invert, update, translate and notice.
It’s the creative version of old, new, borrowed, blue.
A lot of brands ask us at JAR:
“What would make a good podcast?”
I think a better question is:
What can we uniquely notice, combine, highlight, interpret or retell from where we stand?
Answer that well and the podcast concept usually gets easier.
So do the newsletter, YouTube channel, event strategy and social content.
Because now you know what territory belongs to you.
How Is AI Changing Brand Storytelling?
Which brings us back to the strange and relatively new corporate enthusiasm for storytellers.
In her Wall Street Journal article, Deighton connects the rise of corporate storytellers to a media environment increasingly crowded with AI-generated material.
This isn’t merely an aesthetic problem.
Audiences increasingly have to make basic judgments about what they’re encountering.
- Is this real?
- Was it checked?
- Did somebody actually witness this?
- Is there an accountable human being behind it?
- Can I trust it enough to give it my time?
Brands are running into these questions in practical ways.
TikTok Shop, for instance, has seen a proliferation of AI-generated product demonstrations, avatars and virtual creators.
SharkNinja went so far as to tell its affiliates that AI-generated content is not permitted under its affiliate program.
Its preference was simple: real consumers seeing real products being used by real people.
There is a lively irony here.
Making content has never been easier. Making something worth paying attention to may be getting harder.
Which puts us back in the realm of judgment.
- Why this story?
- Why now?
- Who should tell it?
- Does it want sound, pictures, words or all three?
- What should we leave out?
- What does this story add to everything the brand has already said?
AI can give us an astonishing quantity of possibilities.
Somebody still has to decide which ones are worth doing.
Content is abundant. Story judgment is scarce.
Also, you should go see The Odyssey.
