“Hiring for a head of storytelling…”

One of the first things I do every morning is read the papers – specifically the Wall Street Journal.

Today, I saw this headline under the Business & Finance section:

„Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’“

I was a bit surprised to see how… well… essentially:

Companies have FINALLY started to wake up to the fact that AI isn’t quite the shit they thought it’d turn out to be.

They’re going back to hiring marketers who have the ability to genuinely differentiate their brand/work.

(Something that an AI prompt can’t – and won’t ever – be able to do, because it requires breaking convention and venturing into territories the LLMs simply won’t go. Their masters programmed them not to.)

In fact:

Not only have they realised that AI isn’t what Sam Altman & the Big Tech lobby propagated it up to be…

They downright started disdaining AI!

===

“It’s more common now that I get on the phone with CEOs and they’re proactively coming to me saying, ‘It sounds like I need a content strategy,’” rather than a typical press relations strategy, Hirsch said. “The AI slop of it all creates so much distrust, and they see that the brands that are winning right now are the ones that are most authentic and human and relatable.

===

If you watched the Loom video breakdown of my „The great lateral day’s bloody massacre.“ promotional email…

(You can find the link in the Appendix of my Book.)

You’ll remember that I mentioned a certain kind of test at the very end of that video…

‘The Nervous Test’.

I explained how I perform this test on EVERY single email I send out…

I do it because it helps me pre-emptively gauge whether the email will be relatable, human, memorable, authentic, and most importantly…

Whether it will inspire action!

(Whether that action is to check out a website or straight-up buy something.)

And it’s brain-dead simple to perform:

Go over your email… and ask yourself whether the email makes you at least a LITTLE nervous to send out.

If it doesn’t?

You’re NOT being aggressive enough.

And if you’re not aggressive enough, it means you’re being passive – and passivity has NEVER ever inspired anyone to open an email; to read an email; to click through in an email; and ultimately?

To BUY something from an email…

Anyway,

I am very glad even big-time CEOs have started waking up to the fact that authenticity & humanity are what’s going to separate the losers from the winners in the next few years…

Something which a stochastic pattern recognition machine – using neural networks and node weights and tokenised representations of human speech to create some approximation of meaning – without having any personality or understanding of what it’s saying…

… won’t ever be able to do.

And yes, I boldly say the word: „ever.“

Because it doesn’t matter whether it’s ChatGipity 5 or ChatGipity 55…

AI simply isn’t creative. It isn’t interested in anything, it hasn’t experienced anything, it has no opinions about anything, and it only has surface-level knowledge about everything.

That’s why it creates – and will continue to create – boring, vague, surface-level marketing/writing… trying to copy human styles because it has no style/personality/thoughts of its own.

(Fun fact: I’ve read how criminals use AI to rewrite their communications. Apparently it removes their personality & language quirks so their messages can’t be ID’d as coming from the same person. Make of that what you will.)

This is all my own long-winded way of saying how…

Humanity in marketing is quickly becoming a massive value proposition.

(I have already started seeing a few marketing agencies brag, yes – brag – how they use zilch AI in their workflow.)

And the people who will be the most adept at exploiting this Value Prop?

Storystellers.

I have long argued that the reason Apple is as successful as it is…

…was because of Steve Jobs’ fantastic storytelling abilities.

(Look up his 2007 iPhone presentation – a masterclass.)

In fact:

He once went so far as to say:

===

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

===

Plato once echoed the same sentiment – “Those who tell stories rule society”.

And while you might not be interested in ruling societies and setting generational agendas…

(Or are you? Maybe you are quietly plotting out world domination…)

You ARE probably interested in…

Ruling the Hearts & Minds of your customers.

(Unless you hate money.)

Everyone’s waking up to it:

From tech firms… consulting firms… heck – even non-profit conservation groups!

(I’m not kidding, that WSJ article stated how: ‘The National Wild Turkey Federation is looking to fill their third storyteller position since they hired the first in 2023.’)

With all this said…

It now occurs to me that I’ll probably have a lot of work on my plate in the coming years…

(My email methodology is literally called “Email Storyselling” lol…)

So if you want to get ahead and lock me in prematurely?